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List:       opensuse
Subject:    Re: [opensuse] 10.3 AWESOME!!
From:       Kevin Donnelly <kevin () dotmon ! com>
Date:       2007-10-07 12:56:06
Message-ID: 200710071356.06446.kevin () dotmon ! com
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On Saturday 06 October 2007 22:16, Kevin Dupuy wrote:
> Overall, I want to let you know that I'm just a little confused as to
> what is wrong with 10.3? Are you upset that it didn't have everything
> you thought it would? Or does it do something that negatively affects
> productivity.

I don't want to puncture the general conviviality, but on my short 
acquaintance so far with the one-CD KDE disk, I have to agree with Lynn.

Some have mentioned fonts.  I tried to install the legacy nVidia 9639 drivers 
on this test box, and they didn't work (I suspect they are quite buggy).  But 
the fonts before the nVidia attempt (ie direct from the install) were quite 
different from the fonts after the attempt (following a sax2 -r -m 0=nv).  I 
found that odd.

The livery goes back to SuSE antecedents - some will like it, some won't, but 
it's easily changed, as others have mentioned.

After install, 10.3 lost sight of the CD-drive.  This is something I've 
noticed intermittently on 10.2, where a hal restart usually fixes it.  But 
this should not be happening at all on a mature distro like openSUSE.  Such 
was my annoyance that I actually installed Ubuntu 7.04 on a spare partition, 
to check what it would do.  It had no trouble seeing and using the CD-drive.  
(Incidentally, I then did a conversion to Kubuntu to see if it would fall 
over, but it didn't.  I'm now doing an upgrade to 7.10, again to see if that 
will make it fall over.)

The most disappointing feature to date is the revised package manager.  This 
is faster, the one-click install is a stroke of genius, and it's easier to 
add community repos.  But I find it depressing that at no point during beta 
testing does anyone seem to have asked whether the user will want to check 
repos that he may have checked just 10 minutes before.  It does 
say "downloading", but it may in fact only be reading a cache of the 
download - I don't know.  If the latter, that's even more depressing, because 
anyone who has used Smart, Adept, Synaptic or whatever will know that they 
load a lot faster.  With most of the repos checked, this takes 2-3 minutes on 
this 4-year old PC (Synaptic loads all the Ubuntu universe and multiverse and 
a few others in less than a minute on the same PC, by the way).  I went to 
check my network settings, and goodness me, I was given a free 2-minute repo 
check before the network applet even opened!  

Richard Bos asked 3 or 4 years ago (in the time of the 8 series) why apt4rpm 
couldn't be made the default package manager, and with hindsight that would 
have been inspired.  How Novell can spend 2 years (since before 10.0) 
on "improving" the package manager and still get it so wrong beats me. 

You're probably right that for "heavy lifting" on the server/admin/office 
side, openSUSE is still the way to go.  But I'm really wondering whether I 
can recommend it any longer as the ideal beginner's distro.  Sigh.

-- 
Pob hwyl / Best wishes

Kevin Donnelly

www.kyfieithu.co.uk - KDE yn Gymraeg
www.klebran.org.uk - Gwirydd gramadeg rhydd i'r Gymraeg
www.eurfa.org.uk - Geiriadur rhydd i'r Gymraeg
www.rhedadur.org.uk - Rhedeg berfau Cymraeg
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