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Analysis of SuSE Linux Desktop
pdajames writes "ZDNet UK has a look at the new SuSE Linux Desktop, running Microsoft Office. They seem to think Linux is just about there when it comes to desktop users, although their words about StarOffice are not so kind. It seems like some of the reality of desktop Linux is starting to match the hype." Not being an Office power user myself, I felt that way a long time ago, but it's cool to see projects like Evolution get some more street cred.
SuSE is what allowed me to leave windows.
I've tried RedHat, Debian, and Mandrake. They all really do not work well for the desktop.
SuSE, however, has automatic updates (nightly!), EXCELLENT support (although RedHat has support, it is very expensive.)
All in all, fine tuned, ergonomic, German Precision.
A++.
The desktop might be polished, but they complain about a notable lack of polished apps. Essentially the author says that Evolution is about it. And, if you are going to run MS Office, what's the argument, again, for not running it under Windows?
Still, this is a nice step forward. But don't read too much into the article - there is still a long way to go.
When I see terms like "binary compatibility" in reference to a Linux distro, plus things like Lindows' application pay-service, it almost seems like we're being told that different Linux distros can't share the same programs.
If I'm slightly confused by this, imagine what the average user (who I imagine is the target market here) must think.
I think it nice review from outsiders.
Of course it has lots of politically correct F.U.D's.
But seeing positive words for GNU/Linux on ZD very nice. It's like seeing snowing in hawai islands.
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
What, no screenshots? next story
You can try it out if you do an installation right from an FTP server. Granted, ISOs would be nicer, plus the FTP install doesn't come with all the extra software found in the Professional bundle, but still...
StarOffice is intended as a Microsoft Office replacement, and can read and write Office file formats. For most uses, it should be fine, but it does have limits.
I find writing the occasional macro useful in Word and mandatory in Excel. I know that many businesses do implement significant modifications and applications using VBScript for the Windows Office Suite. And there's a significant third party application market of these things, including some very sophisticated data modeling tools.
I understand why Open Office doesn't want to try to implement a VBScript clone, but why isn't there a Python, Ruby, or other scripting language implemented for OO?
What are the obscure technical reasons the article alludes to?
It will be in version 1.1. Just as PDF export for windows and swf export.
You can download beta2 and see for your self.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
What about their FTP server? I thought that you could create an install disk and then pull down a working system from their server, for free. In fact, I found the link in just 2 or 3 clicks on their site.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
There isn't a macro recorder, and for obscure technical reasons, there isn't likely to be one in the near future.
That's plain wrong, there's already a Macro recorder in OOo Writer 1.1 beta2. I also wonder which version they've used. I've been running 1.0.1 for professional purposes without big problems. And the problem I encountered were fixed in 1.1beta2.
They have a Basic intrepreter for stuff like that. It's called IIRC OpenOffice Basic.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
My
Progression over the last 3.5 years, '()' indicate experiments:
Mac 8.6, WIn98, (RH6.1),Win2K, (Yellow Dog, PPC) WInXP Home, Suse 8.1.
The Mac installs were always ez, the win installs were tedious, the RH & Yellow Dog/PPC had me reading manuals left & right. The SuSE install was brain-dead easy (easiest one of the bunch!, even easier than Mac), except for my lack of experience in assigning partitions (found a nice partioning scheme in the LAMP book (Lee, Ware - Addison Wesley).
Still fighting the WIn2K server & converting some Office docs, but that's just a matter of studying.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
This review sounds about right for the state of Linux on the desktop. Lots of polish, lots of nice icons and fonts and anti-alias, but when it comes to native core productivity apps, the polish starts to lack. While I haven't tried Ximian OpenOffice.org, it seems like a step in the right direction -- a bit nicer interface, tighter integration with the desktop, etc.. Seems like lots of smaller apps (and KDE apps) have this nice consistent look and I'll be very pleased as more and more apps achieve this consistent professionalism. In anycase, the review is just about right. With the continued interest of Linux desktop from major distros, governments and corporations, I would have to guess that a lot of these rough edges will ultimately be addressed and the future for Desktop Linux will be very bright.
The sco lawsuit is just the first salvo. As linux grows to be a credible competitor on the desktop, there will be alot of people that will be very upset about it.
You can expect patent claims to come out of microsoft. You can expect the long dead concept of the look and feel lawsuit to raise its head, and every other sleazy tactic that can be used will be used.
Remember during the senate hearings on microsoft, that they complained they always had competitors nipping at their heels ? Well I suspect we are about to find that they were perfectly happy with that as long as they weren't credible competitors.
I've been trying to switch over completely from *f*ing MS Office to OpenOffice, but unfortunately the lack of Outline view/function in OpenOffice is a major problem, that and lack of support for support for EndNote (a reference managing program).
:]
(As a scientist, I have to write a lot of grant applications for my living). Thus, outlining big hairy elaborate boring technical writing things is vastly helped by an outliner. Probably like this post would have been.
Anyway, does anyone know of a good Linux program that allows one to prepare and re-organize writing in an Outline form? No, don't tell me to use Emacs, that would be like a, er, well I can't think of anything clever so I'll just say a mis-use of a fine product.
I think, therefore I thought.
There are many absolute no-nos known by GUI designers. Try reporting a clear violation of one of those rules as a bug on an open source project and see what happens.
Let's open up OpenOffice Write and see what happens.
First, it takes about fifteen seconds to open the first time. Is there a good reason it should take that long? Could something occuring during startup be deferred until later? Could something be rearranged to cut down the number of I/O operations? Is there too much interpretive processing taking place. Yes, the program can be made resident in memory, but that's addressing the symptom, not the problem.
Now we have a window, showing most of a document, including the entire left margin, but probably not including the right edge of the text area. What's wrong with this picture? Try Word and see what it does.
Now type "a". A star-shaped thing pops up in the lower right of the screen. It's not clear what you're supposed to do with it. If you click on it, there's a 10-15 second delay, and a full screen window pops up, obscuring the document being worked on, announcing that "AutoCorrect has been activated. Start each sentence with a capital letter".
What we have here is a failure to communicate. An AI "helper" that doesn't have a clue about what you're doing has intervened before getting enough information to decide what to do, slammed you in the face with a full-screen stupid message, and suggested that you turn it off. That last is the one intelligent thing it's done.
The developers of OpenOffice seemed to be trying to emulate the Microsoft Paper Clip, which in itself isn't a popular feature. They totally blew it.
I could go on. But it's clear that nobody ever did proper usability testing on this thing. It comes across like a really cheezy Word clone.
In fact, OpenOffice isn't all that bad as a program. But as design, it sucks.
All this can be fixed. But because it's open source, it won't be.
"One complaint we have in the ease-of-use department is the integration of the KDE and Gnome user interfaces. Linux applications are generally built on one or the other, and while we ran Gnome applications without any problem with the KDE desktop, there were occasional glitches."
:)
This is really bugging me the most about the current state of Linux on the desktop. We have two great Desktop Environments - thats one too much. I don't buy the argument of competition on the Linux desktop. There is enough to compete against out there (Windows, and especially Mac OS X).Both Gnome and KDE are great pieces of software, but Linux will not success before there is a common environment on which all GUI-centered software is based on.
I personally would vote for KDE as a basis since its IMO more advanced and has a better underlying design. The great stuff in Gnome that KDE is lacking should be ported over. I know this is not going to happen, but it would lead the Linux desktop to a quicker success.
Sorry, for the KDE endorsement, I couldn't resist. I really don't want to start the usual flame war again
What the hell kind of comparison is that?? "Yes, my current 2003 Mandrake operating system installation was much better than Microsoft's DOS 6.22 release in 1994." Come on! Thats just desperate M$ bashing at its worst...
As others pointed out, you can do an FTP install for free. Leaving that aside, I prefer SuSE's business model for my purposes. Red Hat makes money by charging for easy updates, and SuSE makes money by charging for easy access to ISOs. In my case, I have several computers I install it on, so I'm glad to pay the $70 once and get easy free patches without having to register with the vendor. (Not to mention I don't feel like babysitting my CD writer while I burn 5 ISOs.)
Plus, SuSE Professional 8.2 comes with just about the coolest CD packaging I've ever seen. It has 5 CDs and 2 DVDs in this cardboard foldout pack that flips open in various directions. The feel of flipping through that thing is almost worth the price by itself :).
Ive used a SuSE linux desktop for work for years and evolution takes it several steps closer to being perfect for the average office user to use.
... added a backup fileserver share for everyone without anyone asking where it came from ... the desktops are really the only objective left to conquer.
I've already replaced one XP/winroute gateway machine (dont ask me) with a linux box without anyone seeming to notice
Squad move out!
Yes sir!
*DrugCheese rants*
> I know that many businesses do implement significant modifications and applications using VBScript for the Windows Office Suite.
:-).
You are not wrong there. I have worked for a number of very big Wall Street banks and some portfolio managers run practically their whole businesses on Excel macros (no wonder their advice is so bad
At one place they pulled share information from four exchanges down from a mainframe, ran beta calculations using a macro, sent portfolios out to a Barra engine to calculate risk and then displayed the whole thing as a nice report for a fund manager. All this off a single button in Excel. Excel was being used as some almighty scratchpad to do all the calculations.
Doing anything with these kind of applications is a nightmare, they are built up by mathmaticians who don't have the first clue about programming over a number of years. They are rarely documented and are incredibly brittle.
To be honest, Windows applications are like a cancer. Get one in your company and they will eventually eat the whole body from the inside out.
I thought the main reason that Munich went with SuSE is because of cost. But looking at the numbers, I don't see the savings:
Pricing
SuSE sells SLD only in combination with a maintenance programme that covers a minimum of five desktops. The five-desktop, one-year maintenance contract, along with an installation kit, runs at $598, with $99.80 for each additional desktop. A 10-client, one-year contract costs $998 with the installation kit and further discounts kick in for higher-volume customers.
As an education customer, I can buy a perpetual license of Windows XP Professional for $59 per CPU, and $15 for an installation disc. This is not a one-year contract, but a license that is owned for that CPU for its life.
I'm not a Microsoft fan (I'm a Mac person, mostly) but since governments get even better software pricing than education, I would be curious to know what Munich was offered to use Windows over Linux.
From the above description, I don't see SuSE's offering as competitively priced. (Even if it was a longer term license!)
Where am I wrong?
I think it was more of a comment on general ease-of-install nowadays versus back in the good ol' days of DOS 6.22, not cliched MS-bashing.
Windows XP, 2k, as well as Red Hat 9 and Mandrake all intalled flawlessly on my computer with no configuration needed. All of them compare quite favorably to nightmares with managing IRQs and finding obscure drivers back with Windows 3.1 or somesuch.
Leo does a great job with what you're asking for. It's really intended to be more of a programming tool than a writer's outliner, but it still does the job of outlining beautifully, and has some nice perks thrown in. Plus, it's free.
I've used it for organizing book chapters, and it does that job beautifully. I even have a friend who uses it for outlining, writing, and then automatically outputting finished text in LaTeX. That goes way beyond my needs of simple outlining. Unfortunately, Leo doesn't let you print your outline directly to paper. You have to follow an exporting command, and in the process you'll lose your outline's hierarchical format.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
A, if not the, big problem with open source development is that it's not good at fixing usability problems. Too few developers read Bruce Tognazzini, or know who Susan Kare is. They think "user friendly" means "has skins".
Openoffice is ugly. That's just a given. That does NOT imply that all open-source projects are unusable and poorly designed. Try a recent version of Gnome, you'll be pleasantly surprised by how well the apps follow a consistent human interface guide. If you report UI stupidity as a bug on a gnome project, it will be fixed.
You can rip on OpenOffice all you want, but please educate yourself a little before you assume all open-source projects are the same. (Or don't, it probably won't get you a "+5, Insightful" on slashdot nearly as fast.)
0 1 - just my two bits
No one can write anything but a dirty hack in VBA, it _just isn't possible_!
This is SOOO wrong. Bad developers write bad code in VBA (and any other language), good developers write good code in VBA (and any other language). All VBA does is make bad developers out of people having no business coding in the first place because is't so accesible, but their code would be just as awful in any other language.
All you should need is a clean, open API into your business logic which should be destinct from the application suite and centralised for version control and efficiency, which can then hook into a _real_ database for data security and integrity. None of this half assed scripting rubbish that so many people get away with, even for enterprise applications :o(
Scripting is good for (at least) one thing - to act as "glue" between the business logic API you describe (and I agree there should be one), and the user interface. Look at ASP or PHP - they both provide wonderful vehicles for doing "gluing" of business logic to web pages. Scripting is not necessarily bad, you know.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
It got so bad recetly that i had to reinstall my mandrake 9.0 syatem with 9.1 just to use gaim
Then you don't know what you're doing. That sounds harsh, and is. It's easy to get confused by Linux software installation. There are people working on making this a lot easier, but it's not there yet. Until it does, please don't extrapolate your mistakes into "problems with Linux" which don't actually exist.
Also just try using mandrake 8.x .. hardly any precompiled packages off the web will work fo you.
That's due to the fact that developers use the latest versions. You can always compile it yourself. In fact over time with increased awareness of how to compile in a portable fashion, this problem should decline and eventually mostly disappear.
Its really sad becasue all of the resinatlling and crashing drove me to the point that i swotched to OSX so i sould use a satble desktop.
You've gotta be kidding me. OS X doesn't know the meaning of binary stability. Mac users regularly find that they have to upgrade their entire OS because application packages start requiring minor point releases of the it. The lack of any real core API sideloading makes the problem about a gazillion times worse than it is on Linux or Windows.
Let's see what you think the "major problems" are.
1. Gcc changes - s/changes/change/, which only affects C++ apps. This is a one off, and the problem disappears if you compile from source.
2. Glibc changes - glibc always preserves binary compatability. The only time things break is when the apps were broken and relying on wierd facets or bugs in glibc (postgresql springs to mind). Wine is something of a special case, in that before NPTL Linux threading was too primitive to support it, so it had to take a back route.
3. libpng changes (2 and 3 are not compatible on the same machine) - they are actually, what you mean is that major versions 2 and 3 conflict when loaded into the same process image. Recompile the application and the problem will disappear. This one is due to the quirky scoping rules of ELF, and problems like it are extremely rare.
4. people using beta perl or X11 versions to compile - then don't use their packages! Nobody forces you to use packages built by people who clearly aren't interested in compatability.
Performance, however, was surprisingly snappy, considering we were using an older 500MHz Pentium III machine with 256MB of RAM; opening and moving windows around, for example, did not show any noticeable performance lag.
Since when does one need 256MB of RAM and a 500MHz Pentium to move windows around? Is the reviewer so brainwashed by wintel upgrade-mania that he/she does not know that you don't need that much power to simply move windows around the screen?
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
i ave never used StarOffice. however, my P3-933/512MB running RH9 loads OO.org in about 9 seconds. and it runs fast. and the menus are all anti-aliased. and i have never had a crash. and since i'm a teacher, i use OO.org for tons of things.
this desktop thing is really getting stupid. linux is so ready for the corporate desktop. and even the educational desktop. and lots of home users.
if you hired someone who "knows" Word, and they can't figure out Writer in a few minutes, they are idiots, and you hired a moron. this whole retraining things is pure bullshit.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Why do you insist upon using a WYSIWYG document editor?
You're a smart, technical person.
Get Vim installed and spend two evenings reading through the included manual.
Get a TeX/LaTeX/BibTeX system set up.
Not only will you produce much higher quality portable documents, ready for professional publishing, faster, but you will save time not having to fiddle with layout issues and the guesswork that is inherent in an editor like Word.
Vim allows you to have multiple levels of "folds". This means that you can easily hide and unhide logical sections of your document with two keystrokes.
You can customize how the hidden text is indicated and even summarized.
As a scientist, you will be happy to know that LaTeX is as far superior to Word in typesetting mathematical formulae, as is Linux to DOS.
Dude, what he said was, 'binary compatibility is often broken under Linux', and you replied, 'No it isn't, just recompile the applications.'
Do you understand what binary compatibility is? It's not FUD to say that Linux doesn't support it very well. The mantra of kernel development is that source compatibility will always be maintained, but ABIs will always change. Everyone makes an effort to minimize the problem, but the rapid advance of Linux is partly due to developers being able to break ABIs.
hahaha, yes yes, that was my plan!
I'm against picketing but I don't know how to show it.
SuSE needn't be "free" in the way you mean. I tried a basic SuSE install via FTP (free, of course) and enjoyed it so much I bought a boxed copy of 8.2 Pro. It was worth the investment: lots of extra software on convenient CDs and helpful documentation. I've rocked between distros for a while, but will probably settle into SuSE for a long time.
So SuSE *is* free. If you want the extra programs and polish, you can pay for it. It's a deal at $75.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
I think LyX, which has already been mentioned in another post, is a good compromise. It is based on LaTeX, so you can use LaTeX for formulae, tree diagrams etc, and on the other hand, it comes quite close to WYSIWYG (if you count previewing the DIV files, it is WYSIWYG). People who are used to LaTeX perhaps prefer writing LaTeX source code, but I think for many LyX is a good way to have the best of both worlds.
What you are requesting is avaible here, by the way.
What is not possible, though, is freely downloading any of the Enterprise" variants, be is SLES or SLED or any of the derived products. But then, nobody offers that. Nobody actually can offer that because that would jeopardize the entire business model of offering and supporting a stable distro over 3-5 years. TANSTAAFL, folks.
So don't spread false or misleading statements, OK?
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;