On Do, 2021-08-12 at 08:57 -0400, Patrick Shanahan wrote:
- jdd@dodin.org jdd@dodin.org [08-12-21 07:30]:
problem, is that linux distro are evolving differently, at leats interface wise, so a reviewer used to ubuntu can't understand others distros...
in which case the *reviewer* is not qualified to make a review. his output becomes conjecture and guesswork and hardly worth the time to read.
Even if that was generally true, it doesn't help us because people would read these reviews without realizing the reviewer's under- qualification. Thus bad publicity would be generated either way.
But I don't think it's true. I can understand that, especially for users who a try a certain distro for the first time, it provides peace of mind to be explicitly told that the existing OS installations won't be overwritten. The YaST partitioner's summary screen contains this information, but much less prominently, and hidden in a long list of much less important actions like "Create btrfs subvolume XYZ". You basically have to infer it from the absence of an action like "Delete partition sdaX".
This said, I have long given up reading distribution reviews. Lots of reviews focus on
1 installation, usually on a rather simple hw configuration, like a laptop with just a single disk (but more often than not with Nvidia graphics), 2 eye candy of the desktop, 3 ease of configuration of certain hardware, like typical home printers, 4 availability of multimedia applications and games.
None of these items (except 3., maybe) are actually important criteria to choose a distro, IMO. Other aspects, like timely fixes for security issues and bugs, general stability, long lifetime, solid engineering, well-written, up-to-date documentation, good and friendly support infrastructure / community, and availability of up-to-date software and development tools are much more important (list intentionally incomplete). IMO these are areas where openSUSE is better than many others.
However, comparing that in a review would require far more work on the part of the reviewer, which is unlikely to happen. So perhaps, because we know reviews are written the way they are written, we too should focus more on the 4 aspects above...
Regards, Martin