Andreas Hanke wrote:
[...] I don't share this opinion.
Fair enough ;-)
Managers are not dumb. They know that (open)SUSE is perceived as sort of a "test case" for enterprise products, and they know that poor (open)SUSE releases put the reputation of enterprise products into question.
I don't share this opinion. People are so confused about the names, SUSE Linux, openSUSE, SUSE Enterprise, etc., that many don't even know that the SUSE Linux 10.1 from the openSUSE project is the basis for the Linux Enterprise product from Novell. Insiders, of course, will know. And hopefully those who have to make the decisions.
And I actually don't even share the conclusion that Novell doesn't care about (open)SUSE stability. Do you remember the endless discussions about SUSE 10.1 being shipped with "outdated" KDE and GNOME version numbers? These "outdated" releases were chosen because of stability concerns.
Sure. The statement should not be generalized. It concerned the change in software package management in 10.1. Although I would immediately know of other things that didn't really contribute to the stability of SUSE Linux in the past.
I tend to find the discussions about SUSE 10.1 quality rather annoying. New installations will get the first and now even the second update stack during the initial installation, new user's wont even notice the most obvious problems, and the sad experiences early adopters hat cannot be undone any more.
Do you really think people won't recognise that an update of repository data takes about 2 seconds in Ubuntu but 3 min in SUSE Linux, even with the latest updates installed? Well, I think it matters and people will recognize it if they compare. And I think that discussing problems with 10.1 is not annoying but helps to ensure that we won't see similar things in the future. All of this is not meant to upset developers or SUSE guys, and it's never a personal thing. Covering up problems doesn't really help.
Maybe we (the users) should try to be a little bit more forgiving. And we shouldn't forget that (open)SUSE is about a lot more than just package management. E.g., is there any other free Linux offering out there with a better working Xen setup than (open)SUSE? I'm not aware of any. OpenOffice.org with VBA support? Nowhere as good as in (open)SUSE. etc...
I partly agree with you. But you should recognise that Xen is not an essential and central part of SUSE Linux, but the package management is. I installed 10.1 on one of my PCs and I was not able to come up with a system that really satisfied all my needs. I don't need stuff like Xgl, etc., I need my system for work. And I would consider myself as an experienced end user. I know of other people that made similar experiences with the installation process. If people buy a box product from Novell/SUSE, they expect it to function out of the box as intended. If not, they consider the product as broken. They don't want to wait four weeks for an update to fix problems that should never have happened in the first place. They don't want to spend hours and hours to work around problems. My emails might sometimes sound a bit pessimistic or negative. I still believe in SUSE Linux, although 10.1 was a step backward and I was disappointed about the overall functionality and stability. Hopefully, 10.2 will be two steps forward ;-) Again, this is my personal point of view and others might have had completely different experiences. Such is life! Cheers, Th. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-help@opensuse.org