Hi All, I'm hawake, i work to the Italian translation of the wiki, and I'm writing here just to share some thoughts about openSUSE assuming the point of view of a desktop user. In the following list i've collected not just my suggestions and critics but also those of all my friends that I converted to openSUSE 13.1 (after a migration from Ubuntu 13.10, which was unstable... :S ). I hope to be useful to all of you guys contributing to make openSUSE better day by day. I've distinguished 6 main categories. Communication. First of all, as pointed out in other discussions, the communication between developers and community is fundamental. I don't want to reopen this discussion here, i just want to tell you that many non-expert users perceive this lack of communication because they found ambiguous posts around the web and obviously in particular on social networks. BTW I think that the lesson has been learned and we (as a Community of supporters + Developers) are improving. ;) Installation. Installing openSUSE is not a difficult task for someone who can manage installation of a Windows OS but during the partitioning phase there are too many advanced options that are useless and scary for most part of our desktop users [0]. For example, you could hide some of these advanced options (like RAID, tmpfs, NFS, LVM and "Use Btrfs as default filesystem") under an "Advanced options" entry, or redesign that part of the installer so that the basic partition screen has a simpler layout. Software installation. Software.opensuse.org is very nice, I think it could be useful to have it accessible from the desktop because not all users know that it exists (and they use untrusted RPMs found through Google...). In fact it should be an important part of our marketing strategy. System configuration. There is a bit of confusing redundancy between some settings available through YaST and through the settings manager of a DE (for instance printer installation/configuration). We should modify the settings manager of supported DE to tell to the user when are needed root privileges, so that when it's necessary to open YaST. For instance the installation of proprietary stuff for HP printers. Help. I think that the openSUSE Activedoc Start Up guide should be accessible offline as default and in a simple way from desktop. For example, take a look at Ubuntu, you go to the shutdown menu (top-right of the screen) and you have an entry that opens a new window with the common questions about desktop usage (Unity in this case, [1] [2] ): video drivers, printers, information about the desktop environment and how to use it etc.. We still have shortcuts for KDE4, GNOME3 and so on, but they don't bring to Activedoc (which is well written) and is a little bit confusing because they bring to the SDB or HCL (not to an index of ready to use and problem-oriented guides). "Online help" links yet to the Novell documentation for openSUSE 11.0 which is translated only in german [3] and very... very outdated. So here, in the Italian wiki, we are discussing about how we should modify that SDB pages to allow the user to easily find solutions to common problems but we can't modify help.opensuse.org. So it's up to you. Interestingly the Gentoo documentation it's much more problem-solving oriented with an index very complete, see for example [4]. I know that pages like that one are very scary, but they collect a set of useful key questions right at the beginning of the page. I think that layouts like that one should be further studied (obviously not blindly applied!) to improve the usability and accessibility of our wiki. Other. Last but not least, I also report here two annoying issues: SUSE ImageWriter it is not automatically setup to use the file filter *.* (so the unexpert user is unable to see ISO images -> read all of my friends asked me how to use it); after the installation from the 4 GB ISO image, YaST does not automatically disable the DVD local repository, so the user have to handle with YaST's repository manager. In conclusion, all of my friends are enjoying openSUSE and they are using it both for work or study because of its stability, all DE equally supported, YaST, Zypper and someone (like me) really appreciate that is pure FOSS without privacy issues. Although it needs some little refinements to the user-experience as I said before but nothing impossible to do. Thank you and keep up the good work! :) Best regards, hawake [0] http://www.mediafire.com/view/jocz56r29yude8d/screenshot25modificata.png# [1] http://www.mediafire.com/view/bzrrpdgxejvxy9w/screenshot21.png# [2] http://www.mediafire.com/view/92n6youe70rmxxn/screenshot24.png# [3] http://www.novell.com/documentation/opensuse110/ [4] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/AMD64/FAQ -- Linux user number 433087 Linux registered machine number 351448 http://linuxcounter.net/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org