On 2018-02-23 12:02, Liam Proven wrote:
On Thu, 22 Feb 2018 23:14:06 +0100 (CET) "Carlos E. R." <> wrote:
Well... yes, it would be possible, you are right.
In fact, the openSUSE installation DVD is a Live Linux, only that you can not freely interact with the desktop (although it has 3 or 4 text consoles, I miss having an xterm). It is a graphical desktop (I forgot which), and it offers a guided install with many complex options for choosing what to install and how. It is very powerful and versatile, a complex product. I guess it might run on top of a "standard" live, but it simply was not designed that way. It might be changed, but is it worth that effort? I doubt it. It would need lots of more ram.
More than the installed OS would need?
Yes, a Live typically uses more RAM than the normal system for the same apps, as it has to create a ramdisk for the system, and typically without access to swap. See, currently the install DVD needs about 1 GiB of ram to work (with 750MiB it walks, not runs), whereas the installed system in the same machine can run with about half. That "Live" has a very minimal X system, no apps (yesterday I learned it does have an Xterm (thanks Richard!). If you put a full desktop with its apps it will require more ram. And, now that I think about it, it would have many more things that could fail.
It is part of what we SuSE/SUSE/openSUSE users are accustomed to ;-)
Well, fair enough -- and yes, it does seem to resemble my faint recollections of the tools I used to install SuSE Linux Professional 15-20 years ago. I suppose it would.
But if a distro is to thrive, it must grow, right?
And if it is to grow, it has to tempt people across from other distros and OSes, right?
Well...
Well, that's a point. But I would not touch the DVD install system, I would instead create Live CDs for testing and possibly installing KDE/Gnome/XFCE. I think they would be nice for shows and giveaways, too. IMHO, changing the DVD that lot might "piss" a number of the current openSUSE faithful.
The openSUSE Lives that could be installed used a different method. Basically they copied themselves over to the hard disk, no options offered. The last ones were for 13.2, but Tumbleweed also has them, since relatively recently I think.
... that is pretty much what the 2 other leading distros from for-profit companies do. I suggest it's what people are used to these days. Shouldn't openSUSE at least offer the option?
Maybe, yes.
I have been trying out SLE, Leap and various flavours of Gecko in VMs recently. Gecko is very much more like the sort of installation experience I have come to expect, to be honest. It is really pretty good.
I'm not familiar with Gecko. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 42.2 x86_64 "Malachite" at Telcontar)