Donavan Pantke wrote:
I'm sure that the KDE and SuSE folks would love to hear these misc. bug reports and such. Perhaps the vast majority of us linux users out there spend so much troubleshooting time in man pages or google, that many haven't properly tested/commented on the SuSE helpcenter. And that, of course, would hinder SuSE in it's attempts to improve it. The KDE problems obviously need to be looked that, and perhaps with a bug report to SuSE and so forth a patched KDEbase will come out that addresses these issues.
I won't be giving up as my title may have suggested. That was emotion, not reasonableness. I appreciate your not flaming me for it. To your civil response I will offer that I will take all of my issues to Suse, and make them known in a polite manner. I have a strong feeling for the way professional software should work. I really want Linux to kick the butt off MS. So I will continue using it, and communicating what needs to be improved. In the process I might blow off now and then.
I agree with the OpenOffice rant, it's a pretty good app, but I've run into a good deal of issues with how it operates. Perhaps around 1.5 or 2.1 it'll be polished up good enough to be a serious competetor to M$ Office.
There are two aspects to the problems with OOo. One is the default installation usually doesn't look too good, particularly with the fonts, in stock Suse, and I've seen problems in Mandrake. Most of this can be fixed with considerable manual font configuration tweaking. Unfortunately, the process I went through to make my Suse 7.3 font installation just the way I wanted it was so involved, that I just haven't found the time to try to communicate it. And there are plenty of HOWTOs out there that say what I would say anyway, after all, that's how I learned to twiddle the fonts. But I also hacked pretty deeply into the config files of OOo, and there isn't much info about that out there on the net. The biggest improvement is had by using freetype 2.0.9 with the bytecode interpreter enabled, which seems to be in Suse 8.1. The other issue is general bugs, about which I have spent considerable time communicating with OpenOffice.org. For the next few months I'm stressed with a college course in addition to my work. After that I'll try to submit more issues to help them get it better.
My advice would be to snip up your post and the different parts to SuSE, KDE, and OpenOffice, and see what comes of it. Most likely updated RPMS in a couple of weeks, I'd hope. Rants are fine, but SuSE 8.2 won't be any better if the rants aren't given to the people that need them.
Indeed. I will keep working on 8.1, but at home where I can take my time. I will submit issues to Suse.
And, honestly, if you want something that works all around as an OS out of the box, I'd have to say at this point that Mac OSX 10.2 is very polished and complete. When the linux community comes out with a GUI that's as seamless and polished as Aqua is, M$ won't be the richest company in existence for long. They're close already, it's just a matter of time. </soapbox>
I'm sure OSX is very respectable, but I have a philosophical attachment to Linux. I feel very strongly about it, and want very much for it to become a mainstream desktop OS, for the good of all people who want freedom of choice in how they compute. Perhaps I'm a bit too attached to this vision, and it get's me upset when I see that there are still a lot of rough edges on this system. Good day, and thank you for your comments. -- _____________________ Christopher R. Carlen crobc@earthlink.net Suse 7.3 Linux 2.4.10