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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."
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.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
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. 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.