06.26.08
OpenSUSE 11.0: The ‘Vista’ of SUSE?
Early adopters urged to beware
OpenSUSE aficionados and Novell sympathisers teased us a little by claiming that OpenSUSE 11.0 was well received. They urged others to believe that there were no negative reviews, but there are actually quite a few, most of which will be shared on Saturday. Here is a brand-new one which stands out.
For anyone who has used SuSE Linux for a while, the mixed bag that comprises an x.0 release shouldn’t be any su[r]prise. For the unfamiliar, SuSE (and now openSUSE) follow the Windows upgrade rule: wait for SP1. In the case of openSUSE, that’s the x.1 release. In my experience (which started with SuSE Linux 7.2) the release cycle is like this:
* x.0: Big bang, big casualties.
* x.1: Bugfix to x.0 to get back to x-1.3 quality/support/compatibility.
* x.2: Incremental improvements since x.0 that were held up bugfixing for x.1.
* x.3: A stable, polished, albeit aging release.So, needless to say, I’ll be doing my day-to-day work on openSUSE 10.3, for at least a few more months. 11.0 is installed on my laptop, too (thank you grub for making that easy), but I don’t see myself touching it until I see some bugfixes come out of Novell.
Over at the IRC channel, it was suggested some hours ago that OpenSUSE may have given KDE4 a bad name because it included an old version++ and claimed it to be the most polished experience. SJVN was grumpy about it yesterday; Aaron Seigo seems to have shut the gates of his blog.
To be fair, KDE 3.5 is still included on the OpenSUSE DVD, but there is no LiveCD installer for it. Why?
At the end of the day, herein we find more reason to choose GNU/Linux distributions, not Ballnux. █
___
++ Fedora did too, but at the time of its most recent release (9), including 4.1 was less practical.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
AlbertoP said,
June 26, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Maybe you could provide some data to support your statements.
Here you can read some data that support exactly the opposite of what you’re trying to say:
http://news.opensuse.org/2008/06/24/numbers/
About “bad reviews”, it would be better to call them personal opinions, because a review should apply some sort of scientific method to compare one distribution to another and to give a judgement, not just telling the personal and limited experience someone had on his system.
Btw, where did you read someone working for openSUSE say openSUSE had bad review? Please, provide a reference.
Thanks
Xanadu said,
June 26, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Yeah, a positive opinion for openSUSE is a good review, otherwise please consider it just a personal opinion.
RyanT said,
June 27, 2008 at 12:57 am
Xanadu, a review implies going through a rigorous process of weighing up the pros and cons, thinking about your audience, in these cases thinking about things in context rather than random statements based on one personal blog, and trying to give as fair and balanced view as you can for the consumer.
Include the fact there’s some very unbalanced assumptions based purely on one set of hardware, rather than a good range of hardware to properly try out how good its support is overall isn’t a very good sign. I could just as easily say wireless support is the best ever, considering it now works with broadcom based cards (like my own) “out of the box” (I’ve tried the LiveCD), but I realise there is a range of hardware that can be difficult or isn’t supported at all sometimes, but then broadcom cards have been known for how tricky they are, no thanks to broadcom themselves.
Roy Schestowitz said,
June 27, 2008 at 1:09 am
RyanT, I’ll be more careful when using the word “review” in the future. I’m just not so sure what to call it otherwise (”experience”, “test”).
kotorsis said,
June 27, 2008 at 5:13 am
Bashing of a community distribution makes you look bad, not the distro. Especially as you are so obviously _trying_ too hard… Give it up already; most reviewers loved the 11.0 release, many thought it an improvement, only very few didn’t like it.
Roy Schestowitz said,
June 27, 2008 at 5:16 am
I am not trying to be crude. Just remember that Novell is after money; OpenSUSE is about Free software, so you guys should be careful.
The 11th plague of Egypt said,
June 27, 2008 at 11:01 am
Well, I’d rather say that Suse is the Vista of Linux
Same propaganda, same trolls…