On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 1:26 AM, Tilman Schmidt
Not Acrobat Reader and OpenOffice - some PDF viewer and some office suite. Those people jdd wrote about are usually willing quite to accept suggestions of less heavyweight alternatives if it is pointed out to them that their first choice requires a machine they would actually have to spend real money for.
Firefox and Kmail shouldn't be a problem.
Of course people who cannot afford a Real Computer are a niche market. But I think Linux in general, and openSUSE in particular, would be well advised to cater for them.
What I, probably[1] not too well, tried to point out is that the expectations need to be set correctly. If all you've got are 512MB, you can make do with it and work around the limits. But "minimum hardware requirements" imply to me that there is no limit for normal use.
For the normal mainstream PC user trained on products of You Know Who, "minimum hardware requirements" implies "you might be able to install it, but you won't enjoy using it".
I just gave away a 512 MB (448, actually - 64 goes to video) 60 GB HD Athlon XP laptop with a 1024x768 screen to someone who can't afford to buy a new computer. It ran XP Professional for a number of years (came with XP Home) and has run every distro of Linux up through openSUSE 11.2 with one of the two major desktops (KDE or Gnome). I did run Gentoo with WindowMaker on it for a few years just because KDE 3.x was a pig, but it's running fine now with 11.2 and either Gnome or KDE. In any event, if the memory requirements of KDE or Gnome are too high, I also loaded IceWM, WindowMaker and FVWM on it, and will probably also load LXDE. When all is said and done, I think Firefox (and Acrobat Reader) are bigger memory hogs than the desktop, especially if you have a lot of tabs open or download big PDFs. I haven't done memory usage comparisons of Okular, Evince and Acroread yet, but it's probably worth doing now that both Okular and Evince are actually usable PDF readers. They weren't not too long ago. -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky http://borasky-research.net "I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God." ~Alan Hovhaness -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-testing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-testing+help@opensuse.org