On 11/9/2011 12:42 AM, Roger Luedecke wrote:
Truth be told we really are a DIY distro. As far as I know few if any people are getting paid to work on openSUSE.
There used to be. Suse before opensuse was by a large consensus the single best engineered distro. No one had anything nearly as good as yast. Many of the other distros sys admin utils, those that even pretended to try to have any at all, were either full of options and dialogs that didn't actually work, or everything actually worked but there was practically nothing in there so it only even tried to handle the single most common case, or they were just valueless text editors to various config files. Yast both offered far more controls in a safe, managed, and user friendly way AND they damned near always actually worked. And they had been consistently better than most for quite some time. A few other distros were pretty good also but didn't last long, ie Caldera. redhat and debian certainly worked, suse just worked better. It's no crime for a distro to require you to handle things yourself. Especially not a linux distro, especially not a free linux distro. The point, or at least my point, is, it's reasonable for long-time users, and new users too really, to object, for several reasons: * For the long-time users, this is a downgrade from past experience. they'd rather be loyal and continue to like their long time preferred OS because it's still the best for all the reasons it used to be the best. * If it's a diy distro, then take the non-working stuff back out of yast. If there's a button somewhere it needs to work and it needs to be fully documented. If you can't make it actually work, or document how you're actually supposed to use it, then get it out of there, it's false advertising and a problem-factory. There has been some "progress" along this line already, ie the removal of the repair system and boot-installed-system installer options. * If it's a diy distro, then stop having yast and other system scripts override user edits in config files. If I'm to be responsible for making menu.lst and other grub files say what I know it needs to say, then the installer needs to dump me into a text editor on those files and then NOT break my hand-edited files with their _wrong_ automatically generated ideas. Similarly post-install yast and kernel updates and such need to stop breaking my hand-edited files. * If it's a diy distro, then there can be no such thing as "doing something unusual and so it's unsupported" since nothing is supported. By definition you should be able to do whatever you want and the system should not actively fight you over it. Whether something works or not should only depend on the foo of the user who tried to do it. sles may be different, maybe it is still solid, but who in their right mind pays money to have their system be even less common, less documented, less exposed to user experience, less likely to be out-of-the-box compatible with any software out there, than opensuse already is compared to redhat and ubuntu? -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org