An Early Taste of OpenSUSE

Anonymous Coward writes "Finally the site OpenSUSE.org is up and includes some beta downloads. The stable version can be expected around September 2005. Looks like there are some differences between Novell's SUSE and Redhat's Fedora mentioned in the FAQ."

Re:diffs?

[short]

As there were never any. _end_users_.

Re:diffs?

[Karzz1]

So YaST is there and such, but it seems like they are discounting any need for more technical users. Isn't it the technical users that give something like this the boost it needs to get to be more usable? I thought the whole purpose of opening something up was for the technical users.

As I understood it, SuSE employed several KDE developers. I assume this talent went with the sale to Novell. The same Novell that has also recently purchased Ximian. I would say that if anyone in the Linux market had the wherewithal to polish the Desktop, it would be Novell/SuSE. Just my 2cents.

Re:Great.

[HatofPig]

Modded troll, then having your calm, reasonably put (albeit flawed) explination modded flamebait? Oh Snap!

As has been repeated time and time again, the whole point of OSS is to take something and expand on it in a new and creative way. Therefore, branching out and doing your own thing is what keeps it vibrant, interesting, and innovative. Plus, 99% of the time it only takes compiling the source on your specific distro (if the binaries aren't already provided) to get an application installed on it. Something that compiles on Suse will compile on Fedora will compile on Debian will compile on Slackware will compile on Gentoo. For the most part, there is only one operating system.

How's the media and IM?

[zogger]

Out of the box? If this is for "the masses" guy, joe bob is going to want to mash ANY media link and a player popup and play it, and Little Suzy on her Suse box will want to IM her friends immediately.

With no extra downloading/tweaking/hoop-jumping.

The goal (near as I can see it anyway, YMMV) isn't to match windows or mac, it's to be *better* with a default install.

Re:diffs?

[proughlinux]

ditto. I buy at least every other boxed version for the manuals, and to pay back those who are working their butts off to help my computers run so well.

Re:diffs?

[LnxAddct]

To edit gnome menus, you don't need a separate tool, just drag and drop, but because of many KDE folks not figuring that out, the next version will have a configue tool. As far as the compressed XML files go, I have yet to run across any of them, perhaps the GUI related ones are, but in all honesty if a tool is designed to edit a conf file, most likely you shouldnt be editing it by hand, and that holds true for quite a few popular open source CLI apps too. Fedora does *NOT* cut off updates until 2 releases later, also they recently extended the development time to 9 months to give them some time for some really advanced features in the next release. Upgrades have never failed for me and I have no lost functionality. If you decide to not upgrade, Fedora Legacy is active now and effective at keeping older Cores up to date with security fixes.

The reason Fedora tends to be integrated so well is simply because you have literally the best of the best linux engineers working on the stuff. The GUI works so well because of great guys like Havoc and Seth, the kernel tends to have the latest and greatest (i.e. Xen, SELInux, LVM, GFS). Fedora also consistently has security updates out faster then other distros, typically a few days, sometimes over a week. I've used every distro out there including Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, Yoper, Knoppix, Ubuntu, and Suse, but find myself always going back to Fedora. Who better to get my distro from other then the guys who do a large portion of the coding and whose job it is to ensure clean integration with other components. Not to mention, Fedora has a very strict free software only stance which sits well with me.
Regards,
Steve

/. editors: PLEASE link to the mirror list!

[jdfox]

The OpenSuse home page [opensuse.org] links to a sensibly large mirror list. So it doesn't really make sense for you to link straight to the Göttingen mirror from here, does it?

Please change that link to the download page [opensuse.org], and let your readers select the mirror closest to them.

Sheesh.

Re: 21st century linux?

[natrius]

It seems like you're trying to compare Firefox and it's additional features to a barebones Linux distro and extra programs the user gets on his own. I don't think that's what most users want. They want to be able to finish the install and get working, not spend hours customizing their computer beyond little things like wallpaper and shortcuts. Firefox is meant to perform one main task: browsing the web. Any features that aren't necessary or very complementary to that task are provided as extensions. That only works because it only has to browse the web. An operating system is expected to do everything users do with their computers.

Your last point hints at a desire for a more decentralized model for distribution building. It could work, but there are lots of benefits you miss out on as a distribution by not maintaining your own packages. For instance, the large Ubuntu repository allows us to show the users all the programs available to them and let them search among them. [niran.org] For most users, the things they want to install will be there. I think Autopackages work better as a complement to the centralized repository system. When a distribution isn't providing packages for new software as quickly as users want them, it'd be nice to be able to install them in a user friendly way without an official package. Autopackage gets this done, but I think centralized repositories still have their place.

Re:How's the media and IM?

[lmb]

Well, it is a question of licensing. Do you really think SUSE/Novell does not want to bundle these packages directly too? Java, Media Players, Codecs? That they are left out as a deliberate hurdle for end-users?

You really can't blame openSUSE for the licenses and software patent issues.

Trust me, if it was possible right now, all of these additional packages would be included. Please help with rewriting superior OSS packages for them and abolishing software patents by engaging in politics and lobbying.