Marketing suggestions, SuSE Situation & feedback
Dear colleagues, I have certain marketing suggestions and feedback for SuSE Linux 7. Although in general SuSE Linux may be qualified as "very good", there are some weak points. ----------- MARKETING --------------- There are MANY popular news and tech sites (with total number of visitors counted by tens of thousands/day), which do not charge anything for short announcements. Also, professional mailing lists should not be forgotten. SuSE just is not there. It will take probably one part time man to do it all. There are around 250,000 - 500,000 Linux users on the Mac only, how much of them bought SuSE? If SuSE could get just 5% it would translate to 12,500 copies sold, in the worst case ! ----------- UPDATE/UPGRADE --------------- 1) FTP update procedure with YaST 2. Look at Debian and Mandrake (and MacOS), how it should be done. Remember, many people, especially with Mac origin, demand for simple (!) and fast update procedure. 2) WEBMIN is a MUST in SuSE distribution. Although it could be downloaded and installed separately, it is not clear how it will work in conjunction with YaST, which WEBMIN modules may conflict with YaST. You cannot rely just on one administration tool! 3) Installation with YaST must be simpler, YaST should keep catalog of available software packages from distribution CDs and FTP directories (like Debian). 4) Too many internals of YaST are not well documented. ----------- SUPPORT --------------- I found volunteer support on the Debian mailing list to be clearly superior to the one I had with SuSE. Most questions answered the same day (often even hour !), and I did not got replies like "KDE2 problems are not covered by installation support". The best solution I believe is to create a forum and mail list dedicated solely to support and configuration issues. Let's be honest, for $50 it is just NOT possible to afford 60 days tech support. With best regards Andrei Verovski andrei.verovski@bigfoot.com
Andrei Verovski wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I have certain marketing suggestions and feedback for SuSE Linux 7.
Although in general SuSE Linux may be qualified as "very good", there are some weak points
I don't agree with most of these, but I *do* agree with this one:
1) FTP update procedure with YaST 2. Look at Debian and Mandrake (and MacOS), how it should be done. Remember, many people, especially with Mac origin, demand for simple (!) and fast update procedure.
Yes, keeping the packages up to date is a major chore with SuSE. The nice things about SuSE are enough for the time being to override this for me, but not for others. Not having a simple or painless way to keep up with the various updates is a real turn-off for a number of people I know that are now on Debian or even BSD fer gawd's sake. Either a way to just say "apply all current updates" or similar with a chance to veto specific packages (and set a persistent veto-list) would make a huge, huge difference. Oh, and *no-one* seems to be able to produce KDE2 RPMs for SuSE that don't completely screw over the RPM/YaST dependencies wrt KDE1 and YaST2. I've resorted now to building KDE2 and QT from source into /usr/local and deinstalling all references to anything KDE from YaST. -- Rachel
On Friday 09 February 2001 06:29, Rachel Greenham wrote:
Andrei Verovski wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I don't agree with most of these, but I *do* agree with this one:
1) FTP update procedure with YaST 2. Look at Debian and Mandrake (and MacOS), how it should be done. Remember, many people, especially with Mac origin, demand for simple (!) and fast update procedure.
Yes, keeping the packages up to date is a major chore with SuSE. The nice things about SuSE are enough for the time being to override this for me, but not for others. Not having a simple or painless way to keep up with the various updates is a real turn-off for a number of people I know that are now on Debian or even BSD fer gawd's sake. Either a way to just say "apply all current updates" or similar with a chance to veto specific packages (and set a persistent veto-list) would make a huge, huge difference.
Rachel, I would like to see some things changed in the way YaST does this. I have not tried it with YaST2, and right now my CD modules are in the shop so I can't try it. I don't suspect there is much difference in the general procedures though. I would like a checkbox list of packages which are subject to upgrade. XEmacs does a very nice job of this. I can then review the list and select the ones I want. The idea of simply saying "gi'me what'cha got" is not attractive to me. I want to know what I'm doing to my system. Being able to view the complete rpm metadata while in the update interface would also be nice. If I'm not mistaken, YaST does a --force --nodeps which is dangerous. Another thing I find anoying is the requierment that I download those big data files every time I connect to the FTP server using YaST and not starting from CD. It should check for a signature or time stamp and only download ones that are newer than what has already been downloaded. Still another frustration is the need to visit and process every directory individually. It would be convient if we could simply tag all the stuff we want and hit 'go' once. Even having a changelog.txt at the root of the updates directory would be nice. Then there would be no need to go poking around in every directory to find out what is new. They try to do these things through the updates page on the website, but that remains out of date in comparrison to what is actually published on the FTP server.
Oh, and *no-one* seems to be able to produce KDE2 RPMs for SuSE that don't completely screw over the RPM/YaST dependencies wrt KDE1 and YaST2. I've resorted now to building KDE2 and QT from source into /usr/local and deinstalling all references to anything KDE from YaST.
Part of the problem with the KDE and KDE2 is SuSE trys to split the difference and make both support the other's installation. I've actually had decent luck with the KDE2.1b2 SuSE put out on ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/distribution/2.1beta2/rpm/SuSE/7.0-i386 These are a bit stale. The boys at Mandrake were doing a good job of pushing out beta RPMs but I don't like the way Mandrake puts the entire world under /usr/ (not even /usr/local). You, of course, could download the latest betas and build them yourself. I'm doing this currently. It only takes about 10 hours on a P-III 400. ;-/ I hope SuSE begins putting the KDE2 config files under ~/.kde and not ~/.kde2 soon. Some programs which are intended to be KDE aware expect to find things in ~/.kde . Even SuSE's window manager seems to miss this subtelty. Now what I need to do is figure out how to put the KDE2.1 under /opt/kde2.1 and get it to show as one of my KDM options. I believe all I need to do is xemacs /opt/kde2/share/config/kdmrc & and add kde21 (I don't know if it will take the '.' in kde2.1) to the sessionTypes variable. Then symlink ln -s /opt/kde2.1/bin/startkde /usr/X11R6/bin/kde21 and finally xemacs /opt/kde2.1/bin/startkde & and force the environment to point to the correct $QTDIR and $KDEDIR. I'm using the ftp://ftp.troll.no/pub/qt/source/ qt-x11-2.2.4.tar.gz to build this, and I don't want to screw up the SuSE betas so I'll put the new the QT under /usr/lib/qt2.2.4 and export $QTDIR=/usr/lib/qt2.2.4. I sure hope that's all it takes. I also hope the fact that I'm building with a stale kernel and a stale glibc doesn't cause a problem when I try to move it over to this box. I may even get very bold and try my hand at fixing up the /opt/kde2/share/config/SuSE/config/kdmrc and putting it in the respective directory for my new build. Steve
participants (3)
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Andrei Verovski
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Rachel Greenham
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Steven T. Hatton