Comments

• AlbertoP

  2008-06-26 21:05:41

  Thanks. It's not demoralizing at all. I would say it's positive! Let's see why. You reported 13 reviews.
  
  1) The first review concludes it does the daily job. So it's positive.
  
  2) The second one complains about "lack of focus", which means openSUSE is versatile, and maybe it doesn't excel, but it again does the job on various fronts. So it's positive. It takes the direction you want, and not the one someone decided for you. :-)
  
  3) The third one states it's for power users. Well, it's not an issue. It might be if you only think to attact new users, but if you think on the long run, it's not.
  
  4) The fourth review complains about the EULA non-existing issue. It has been clarified many times, and the problem is simply related to the redistribution of Novell's brands. You can safely use openSUSE everywhere. It's just necessary to read the whole EULA (and maybe report it in the review, as the reviewer should have done).
  
  5) The fiddling problem is related to versatility. Try to configure samba shares, server services, iptables without YaST, and we'll talk again about this :-)
  
  6) The fifth review speaks about issues with some specific hardware. That's OK. It happens, but a bugzilla report would have helped.
  
  7) See 6.
  
  8) The menu critics are OK. But it's really simple to change back to the GNOME default. openSUSE didn't lock you into its choices. And it's what the author of the revied did ;-)
  
  9) Just a comparison. No glory, no bad comments.
  
  10) It stays with openSUSE, and switches to GNOME. Well, there's KDE 3.5.9 if he wants. And he can install it simply from the repository, no need to download the full DVD.
  
  11) This is a bug, obviously.
  
  12) Seems a positive comment :)
  
  Excluding specific issues (audio, bugs, ...) which are present almost in all distributions (3 reviews), and can be probably fixed in days with a bug-report (the community is done of this, users test -> report -> get fixes) and legal (unmotivated) complaints (1 review), the others are more comment on specific issues, with a general positive overview of the distribution, than negative reviews.
  
  Regards

• David Gerard

  2008-06-26 22:28:30

  To be fair, PulseAudio is a bit of a nightmare for many people, e.g. it completely breaks sound in Wine on Ubuntu 8.04. It's the next Linux sound architecture, so rolling it out in current distros makes some sense ... but it's still rough.

• Michael

  2008-06-27 03:50:35

  Of course - most of the negative comments apply to all modern mainstream distributions. They all use the same underlying free software base.
  
  IMO the desktop has gone no-where in the last 5 years, and probably gone backwards in the last 2. And mostly because of the desire to mirror the latest windows or mac desktop, and because stable/mature projects keep getting replaced by unstable ones with more active development that promises to fix all the past problems - e.g. pulseaudio, packagekit, tomboy, etc.
  
  Also, too many services are being put into 'the desktop'. You don't even get a network started unless you log in on a Fedora box (by default_. And what's worse, all of these services are written by application coders not system programmers, so they're usually not very good at what they do either, duplicate services/versions for different environments, with all the memory and processing overhead to boot.
  
  For example, at one time X used a central font server that generated glyphs for all applications, now they use freetype and performs client-side rendering - so each client needs to load and process and render it's glyphs independently. Overall the system uses more memory and far more bandwidth and takes more cycles to do it. This is the sort of short-term thinking (e.g. we want aa truetype fonts and the server doesn't do it) that will always set a linux destkop behind a more integrated one like a mac. Like audio (but not so low level) font services are a central part of the (graphical - i.e. X) platform, and belong at the platform level, not in every application.

• Victor Soliz

  2008-06-27 04:18:57

  IMO the desktop has gone no-where in the last 5 years

  ...
  
  Anyone who has tried a setup in 2003 and tries one now must really disagree with this.

• Anonymous

  2008-06-27 08:02:33

  I wonder when you will start to cite Bugzilla reports as proof for openSUSE's imperfectness ;-) - there are thankfully still more people out there using Bugzilla than expecting the (upstream) developers to read their blog for bug reports.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2008-06-27 08:55:17

  Anonymous, I agree.
  
  I've posted this because AlbertoP asked me to. Hope it helps.

• Chris Lees

  2008-06-27 11:54:09

  So what you're saying is that Ubuntu is better than OpenSUSE?
  
  But you hate Ubuntu!
  
  I didn't see anything especially negative in anything that was written in this article. OpenSUSE is for power users, it's a solid distro, it's trying to be everything to everybody (so it's a traditional approach, which isn't necessarily bad), YaST is great, it's a well put-together distro, etc etc.
  
  I've heard much worse gripes about Ubuntu 8.04. Which, of course, you also hate.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2008-06-27 12:19:21

  Who hates Ubuntu? Chris, is this directed at me? I don't hate any distro, probably with the exception of Xandros and the *spires (at a lower degree). I still miss SUSE for YaST.

• John M. Anderson

  2008-06-29 23:17:09

  And just for the record, I love openSUSE 11.0 and my blog post was to be helpful for those having specific issues with pulse audio... These issues would also be in Fedora and Ubuntu as they both use it as well. I was not complaining about 11.0 except for maybe that they shouldn't have followed everyone else and included Pulse Audio, its just not ready for real time use yet.