I personally believe openSUSE is the community distribution for Novell, and its for everyone that's not an enterprise (as in, home, home offices, enthusiasts, geeks, everyone that SLED isn't targetted to....)
Last time I checked, its pretty darn stable as a distribution (specially 10.2!) 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
On Thursday 03 May 2007 11:07, Justin Haygood wrote: problems that arose from that new technology i.e. the new gnome and kde interfaces, and the updater issues. 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 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. 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 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 support.opensuse.org forum\KB to even exist. These things are all being 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 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 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 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. 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. -- 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