Tim O'Neill schrieb:
The original comment on support I think may be a valid one. If Novell wants to break into the desktop market in a serious way then there should be more information available. I have been trying to get a desktop to allow log in through a Windows domain and have tried many things to no avail. I also was told that the question was a chargeable one.
Well, if you ask me, Linux isn't really ready for the ordinary Desktop user.. I don't think that SuSE -ahm Novell- can change that in the short term. I'm running 9.0 AMD64 here and browsing SMB has never worked for me. KDE never managed to set the volume of my sound device - I had to use alsamixer for doing that. Some programs I tried installing from SuSE supplied DVD just died SIGSEGV when invoking for no obvious reasons. The YAST kernel update once upon a time was working - today I do this by hand, cause I don't trust YAST on getting the job done (stalled downloads etc.). But I don't complain - that's Linux. Nothing's really working here as it should.. ;-) If SuSE was to build a suitable desktop distribution, I fear SuSE would have to start from the very beginning and just supply a small set of applications that are widely tested, were found to be stable, are pre-configured in a sane manner, come with sufficient and in-depth documentation and can be updated over several years without having to install a completely new base system. However, this is impossible to achieve given the development process of open source software in general.
This in itself is fair enough however the big difference between Microsoft and Suse (for example) is that Microsoft have on their site a huge amount of information, white papers, and 'best practice' documents that anyone can look through. The basics are normally covered so if you are simply evaluating a product you can do this without real cost.
Actually there is plenty of free information available about Linux. You "just" have to invest enough time to find the right piece. Willi