On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 02:41 +0200, stephan beal wrote:
Hiya!
Warning: this mail is long-winded. If you're not up to reading a very long post, then don't bother - delete it now.
------------------------------------------------ A bit of background:
One of the things i've always loved about Suse, and boasted about to anyone who's asked me why i use it, is that i can pop in the installation DVD and be back online and working again within an hour or so. Back in the old days, when i used to love to spend 2 days configuring my box after each new installation, that wasn't a concern. But as i've matured [i.e., grown old] and Linux has become my primary OS, both at work and at home, getting and staying online and functional
snip
------------------------------------------------ What Suse could DO BETTER:
- SIMPLE documentation. IMO, Wikis are HORRIBLE means of documentation except in some unusual circumstances (and i can't think of a good use case for a wiki, to be honest). They are, almost without exception, butt-ugly, hard to weed through, and are notorious for having out of date or duplicated entries (each of various quality). By comparison, Kubuntu's online manual is a dream come true: http://doc.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/desktopguide/C/index.html
Using it, within *literally* minutes i figured out how to effectively use one of the package managers (Adept, a Qt front end for apt) and install my XVid/mp3/multimedia stuff. With Suse you've got to search for ages, then go find the software, install it, and hope it works. The typical case is: a) figure out that it doesn't work, b) google a bit, c) go ask on a mailing list (like this one), d) get a terse answer with the word "packman" in it, e) go add the sources to yast, f) install, waiting on yast to try to figure out if it can use the remote install source, g) try again. Ad nauseum.
OpenSuSE being open, cant the community stand together and change the package manager to something that works? Or am I misinformed about the open source process? Why should we wait for Novell to change the distro? If I wanted to wait for a SW provider to fix things I'll go back to Windows. My 2c worth. E-Mail disclaimer: http://www.sunspace.co.za/emaildisclaimer.htm