On Tue, Nov 08, 2011 at 11:17:22PM -0800, Thomas Taylor wrote: [ 8< ]
Personally, I find the installation to be difficult for a "newbie". I've used openSUSE since version 5 or 6 and find the most recent (11.3 thru 12.1) to be very user antagonistic. Yes, I know how to make modifications during the install process but how many users just starting to experiment with linux (and therefore SUSE) would know that?
Even if they read the available documentation? Either online or the included one? And how many new users have a need to modify the defaults? Don't you see the chicken/ egg issue we're faced by?
There is no documentation on the DVD iso's explaining anything about things like what "branding"
You believe a new openSUSE users needs to know about this?
is, why a separate /home is a good idea,
This is part of the partioning process. And why the fun is a separate /home such a brilliant idea? I count it dependeing on the use case of a system a bad idea! Have you ever had to change the partition size of an installed system cause the root fs got to small after some years? It's an annoying task. How many new users know about what a partition is at all?
what network settings (during install)
Yes, 20 pages about TCP/IP are required to be read as 90% of users with a network connection at home nowadays have a small device which provides a DHCP service. ;)
are (i.e. loopback device),
That is alos basic and general network knowledge. Is it the obligation of the openSUSE documentation people to offer an introduction into basic TCP/IP networking? No! Do I need to know what a loopback device is to get my system running and to fire up a web broswer and to ask a search engine what a loopback device is good for? No! Do I need to know what a loopback device is good for to get the dirt out of my nose? All of you know the answer and don't like to know more about this particular topic. ;)
or even how to handle some of the more common problems during install (video cards, etc.).
Video cards are really a tough task and I'm feeling with the people working on the X.org stuff. To me this is after several months (if not years) of using the automatic config capabilities of X.org still a bit of mystery. But _only_ as I'm using a multi displays setup as I do with my main work station. But I count multi display setups still a spacial case and I even saw Microsoft systems failing with the wrong combination of graphic cards and drivers. Sure, even this doesn't make it better if openSUSE fails. BUT the majority of use cases are a single display setups. In particular since huge displays are no longer this expensive. Despite one huge 20something display I'm able to operate all the systems with the default approach quite well. So what's going wrong here? I'm using ~ 3 years old hardware as my main workstation system. "WTF is SUSE this cheap?" you might think. Till it started to reboot once or twice a week without calling for it I was quite happy with it. All the testing of openSUSE Factory or 12.1 I'm doing either with an even older box - I count this a feature and not a bug as I'm sure there are enough people out there testing with the latest C- and GPUs -, laptops or virtual systems. As we're this close to the release even my main workstation is now running 12.1 since RC 1. But to get back to my point: It's the new hardware which often causes trouble. See how old openSUSE 11.4 the current stable and released version is already. Many of the seen issues are addressed meanwhile upstream as part of the Linux kernel, X.org, or Samba for example. But the stock openSUSE 11.4 mainly gets feeded with bug fixes. And the older - if not already old - openSUSE 12.1 will get, the more issues with newer hardware we'll see. That's the reason why Greg started the Tumbleweed¹ project. The intention of it is to provide a rolling release. Without forcing people to add 20 or even more and also potentially conflicting software repositories. But from the discussions about Tumbleweed on this list we know even this is not the aaproach which is able to make everyone happy. Cause we even here saw software components failing after Tumbleweed got a newer version. But it's also painful by other reasons. You again might ask why? Cause it's causing work and Greg who put the hat on for this is a Linux kernel dude. Honestly I prefer him working on that stuff. Yes, I'm such an egoistic but most of the time a funny and relaxed bastard. ;) I would prefer the community driving a project like this. As Wofgang does for openSUSE Evergreen².
And what are we to think when we submit bug reports that don't seem to be investigated during several milestones? The only response seems to be to call them duplicates but not find a solution until enough duplicates are accumulated.
As this is a community project bugzilla is a tool to track issues to enable the comminity to coordinate their efforts. The way you describe it it more sounds like you believe as soon as a bug report got filed the community part is done. Sorry, that's not the case and that's not how it's expected to work. Bugzilla is a tracker tool and not a trash bin. IIRC that was the intention of Henne's talk more than a year back.³ One example to stress the approach a bit more. There was and is this lovely "printing in openSUSE 11.4 doesn't work" issue. All I did is to get the required information to make my brothers printer work again. Parallel port printing will nevertheless vanishh in the next years. Therefore you'll not see further investigation from my side on this. You'll not see me putting any further energy on bug 673845 But luckily Silviu did! Are there more such crazy people? Yes, there're! See the AppArmor case. I count it as a feature to protect Samba's daemons. Therefore I first ensured to get this working for Samba with SUSE Linux Enterprise Service Pack 2. Sorry dudes, that's what SUSE pays me mainly for. Luckily there are guys like Christian which are spending private time very, very productively on openSUSE _and_ upstream in the particular case. That really rocks and that's the way how a project like openSUSE is driven forward. And that's the way I would like to see more of you spending the time instead of complaining about how all this stinks and sucks. To the initial complain Seife already gave an answer which goes in the right direction. It's all up to us to make openSUSE a better if not the best community Linux distribution. It's also up to us to make the environment we're working in comfortable and attractive. Only then we'll be able to win and motivate more people to use Linus in general and openSUSE in particular and to contribute to both. To complain is good but in the majority of cases it doesn't drive things forward. Please use the tools like bugzilla and openFATE⁴ to drive issues forward. And please don't see both tools as trash bin. ;) Lars ¹ http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed ² http://en.opensuse.org/Evergreen ³ http://news.opensuse.org/2010/10/20/opensuse-ass-kickin-keynote/ ⁴ https://bugzilla.novell.com/ and https://features.openSUSE.org/ -- Lars Müller [ˈlaː(r)z ˈmʏlɐ] Samba Team SUSE Linux, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany