On Friday 04 May 2007 01:29, Pascal Bleser wrote:
James Tremblay wrote:
ok, but historically since 10.0 we have introduced new technology (because we are an engineering distro, not a packaging distro i.e. Ubuntu) that I would not expose the first timer to, in the sense of learning how to overcome the problems that arose from that new technology i.e. the new gnome and kde interfaces, and the updater issues.
What "new GNOME and KDE interfaces" ? KDE 3.5.6 ? The new start menus ?
yes, early on, I had mine crash and want to restart more than once.
If opensuse wants to target the soho/homeuser then lets have an LTS version, lets gold master 10.2 without the zenupdater , with gnomebaker, with wireless drivers and their instructions and support it for 3 years like Ubuntu. Other
It's not because Ubuntu does an "LTS" that it is the best nor the most viable model. Canonical has still everything to prove wrt their support. Furthermore, LTS is not free, nor is SLED. Actually, if it's a desktop you're after, SLED is less expensive than Ubuntu LTS. And, at the very least, the SUSE engineers have proven their capabilities in the past wrt support, which is not yet the case for the few full-time employees of Canonical.
you make my point the moment you bring SLED into the conversation. SLE is rock solid , I use it for many things at my school and I love it. Finding answers to problems is easy with support.novell.com and as long as you don't want some package thats not included, all the applications that a person needs to work in the enterprise are all at your finger tips and since an enterprise techie is involved,wrt modifications, adding outside packages isn't really a question, is it?
wise it really isn't for the first timer to have to struggle with drivers and codecs and updators and looking for everyday applications and then in 18 months have to update it by reinstalling everything to continue to get security updates.
If feature-stability and long lifetime is what you're looking for, buy SLED for a few bucks. If you want evolution, new features, improvements, go for openSUSE. But that doesn't mean it has to be "beta-quality", unstable nor anything else.
Wireless configuration support and the network manager are still unstable especially when registering to the customer center during installation and lots of people don't rewire their homes, they buy a wireless router and wireless cards and pay someone to set it up or call Dell to walk them through it. Are we ready to compete with that ? No , i don't think so , we would need
Sure but that's not any different from other Linux distributions. openSUSE is pretty good wrt hardware detection and easy of installation IMO.
Blame the wireless card vendors, they're making an awful mess out of chipsets, incompatible devices with the same model number, closed specs, etc...
I'm not saying Ubuntu is any better in this regard.
that 900 system in place, we would need the update.opensuse.org to be set up as the default update channel in yast( even if registering fails) and have it redirect to other mirrors, we would need software.opensuse.org to be the default application source for add-ons (like the multiverse) and a
The build service repositories (software.opensuse.org) just contain too much software -- having it split up into many repositories as now is the right model. You wouldn't want experimental xorg73 packages to show up in the same repository as the latest Firefox package. Then there needs to be some work done to present software in the correct usage categories. i.e. experimental , stable , games , productivity , hobbies, etc. and of course searchable without running of to someone else's web page , i.e. webpin, which isn't an obvious description of what you get there and should be a drop down choice of search.opensuse.org
update.opensuse.org makes sense though.
support.opensuse.org forum\KB to even exist. These things are all being
http://suseforums.net/ http://suselinuxsupport.de/ http://opensuse.us/
not located as a click from opensuse.org , remember these people that we are trying to gather have never heard of SuSE. They only know , if at all , opensuse. They want a onestop shop.
discussed and worked on but we can't put the cart before the horse and start extolling the virtues of our distro to the homeuser, when in reality we the enthusiast are the only ones that can make it all work with a little guidance from friends in obscure places like the irc forums. Some one needs to start
IRC "forums", "obscure" ?
yes, obscure to the masses , take a group of windows power users with no linux knowledge hand them a laptop and a copy of opensuse , tell them they get to keep the laptop if they can recreate their home computers applications and functionality , without any help from us. Bet they don't even think about an irc forum, and if they do, get frustrated trying to get the system to get them there. We are trying to sell computers to the single mom who's kids need a computer but the one with the Microsoft tax is 200.00 dollars more, as well as the power user.
consolidating the places we get help from on an intuitive location like "support.opensuse.org" because the masses are used to the host domain having these kinds of pages. our front page is difficult to navigate because the things homeusers are looking to find aren't what we look for when we go
File bugs for those suggestions, give feedback to the web designers of the site when they make a proposal on the list (but not hidden in a large post on this list ;))
start a mailing list "opensuse-website" I'll join
there, even software.opensuse.org has changed recently and it is obscure even to me how to search for packages in the different repos. I was looking to see
True, it's still lacking a lot on the end-user interface, but efforts have been concentrated on the packager side of things up to now (which is even more important in the first place). Hopefully there will be some sort of interface for users soon. As for finding packages, Benjamin Weber's webpin is currently the best option.
is that mature enough to sell to the single mom?
if we had a 10.2 package for NBD and had to go to google to find it on opensuse.org, this is unacceptable to the novice. So that novice goes looking for a click and run distro like Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is no "click and run distro", it's by no means easier to set up and use than openSUSE. The only thing that's better with Ubuntu is the package manager. Idealizing Ubuntu as being perfect and not having any issues is ridiculous.
you confuse installation with adding software , which is probably why Mr. Dell is looking at Ubuntu for his end user PC's he knows that not only techies will be asking for them and he has looked at what offerings are made to that curios windows power user after the install.
No our structure is still to immature to sell it to the homeuser masses, therefore I agree with Justin and Bruce and Ted, opensuse is the techies version.
Not to say there aren't a lot of things to improve, but it isn't a "techies version" more than SLED nor Ubuntu nor Fedora nor ...
as far as I'm concerned they are all techies versions and Linux suppliers, not Linux itself, are the ones that need improvement. We need to hire people in marketing to layout our sites we need to do more user testing like Novell did to find out what SLED needed and how people used it. Only now we are working on delivery not functionality so we need to do usability testing on our websites. I stand by my assertion that our structure is still to immature to offer to the masses. -- James Tremblay Director of Technology Newmarket School District Novell CNE 3\4\5 CLE \ NCE in training. http://en.opensuse.org/education --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org