Il giorno dom, 13/05/2007 alle 10.43 -0400, James Tremblay ha scritto:

"Conclusion: I must say that both of these distros have pleased me a lot and completely suffice my requirement of a home desktop system. Both automatically detected all my hardware and had installed the drivers required. However, when it comes to comparing the two, I get a little biased towards the more polished distro -OpenSUSE. SUSE shines as desktop OS. Like my above article demonstrates, SUSE wins the battle 11-3. Though package management is a very big factor, where OpenSUSE requires modification, at the same time the system stability, system responsiveness and the overall performance also play a big role in I just hope that Ubuntu devs take this as a positive criticism and try to improve upon the mentioned grey areas. SUSE simply shines in comparison. It feels like a desktop ready distro, while Ubuntu merely strives to be a desktop oriented distribution. I just wish that OpenSUSE improves their package management, then it can easily become the best desktop Linux distribution.

Yes. The guys at SUSE are working on these issues, as you already know, and hopefully they should be solved for 10.3. Regards, A. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On 5/13/07, James Tremblay wrote:

On Saturday 12 May 2007 14:36, Francis Giannaros wrote:

...

On a good note, I'm really happy to hear that some discussions have been going on about Novell marketing with regard to openSUSE. It would be really nice if we could know the results of those discussions.

I thought I'd just raise http://www.novell.com/products/opensuse/comparative.html also as one of the items that needs to be changed.

"Linux users and technical enthusiasts, experienced computer users and community developers"

seriously , this is an accurate description of the currant skill set needed ( if you don't believe me Google "openSUSE vs. Ubuntu" and read the threads) ,

No, it is not; neither would those threads justify your position. openSUSE is very widely used, and that description is by absolutely no means a prerequisite for general usage of it. I know this from experience with speaking to _many_ openSUSE users, from my own usage with the distribution, but also direct experience since my whole family use openSUSE. What's one of the biggest shames is that people confuse "The Package Manager" (a YaST module) with YaST. This means YaST gets an awful lot of stick for previous problems with the package manager, since YaST itself is pretty pacey, reliable, and an awesome administrator settings application. Kind thoughts, -- Francis Giannaros http://francis.giannaros.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

Den Monday 14 May 2007 03:44:30 skrev James Tremblay:

you probably installed it for them giving them the upper hand on "Joe User" in regards to dealing with the package manager. No one is disputing that once it's installed openSUSE is the most wonderful and usable distro available.

I'm a little split here - I can accept that Novell marketing says it's for enthusiasts. Non-enthusiasts can use it with a little enthusiast-hand-holding - and exactly the same goes for MS Windows or Ubuntu when it's not preinstalled and preconfigured. Do the enterprise users install and configure the system themselves? I'd think they have some admins for that. What percentage of MS Windows users install their own operating system? To some extent any not-preinstalled OS is for enthusiasts, but that's no reason to discourage people from using it. Dell and Ubuntu are saying the same thing about Ubuntu - that it's targetting the enthusiast market. It's when Novell people say it's "bleeding edge for geeks" that they really cross the line and my blood starts to boil. I don't agree with Justin Steinman that we are worse than neither Ubuntu nor MS Windows wrt. stability or usability. We certainly have room for improvement, but those products damn sure do too. My point of view is that Novell people don't seem to realize the quality openSUSE has to compared to other free as in beer distros with regular releases. There's absolutely no reason not to recommend it. Of course 10.1 was a disaster but any sane person will have repressed that from their memory. And there's no reason to believe problems of that magnitude can re-occur. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On 5/19/07, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

On Sat, 12 May 2007, Francis Giannaros wrote:

...

http://www.novell.com/products/opensuse/comparative.html [...] There also seems to be some other misconceptions in that comparison, like "Retail" instead of mentioning online download as well. A little unsure about the "limited availability" of security patches. These are guaranteed, right?

The "limited" here may refer to the shorter period of time where Novell and the SUSE Security Team provide security support and updates compared to the Enterprise products (namely 2 versus 7 years).

I have asked my colleagues to look into this and also the retail issue. Thanks for pointing these out!

I think it's only one of the many places that highlight something inherently wrong with the attitude towards openSUSE from Novell employees who don't work on it. The two products are for fundamentally different things: an enterprise, and another for the average desktop user consumer. Since they have different scopes (and particularly since they're developed by the same guys) these really shouldn't be seen as some type of competition in any way, and I _really_ don't think we need to undervalue the quality of openSUSE in order to enchance the marketing of SLE. That table comparison should be putting forward openSUSE's strengths just as much the SLE ones, while all I get from it is an impression that it's trying to undercut the quality of the distribution with inaccurate remarks that demonstrate favour toward SLE (and it's not exactly subtle). Anyhow, as far as everyone tells me, these issues are being addressed, so I'll sit tight and hope people have time to get around to it. :-) Kind thoughts, -- Francis Giannaros http://francis.giannaros.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org