ubuntu-desktop is just a metapackage that has dependencies to basically all desktop apps that are installed by default in Ubuntu (so that for example if you do a minimal install you can later on just do a "desktop installation" later on very easily (e.g. sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop). So you can remove ubuntu-desktop safely and everything will work just fine (which you would find out also if you read the package description of gnome-desktop).
Also, one particularly useful feature I've found with ubuntu/debian package handling is in cases where you need/want a slightly newer version of an application that's not yet available in the repositories with the version you want, you can do "sudo apt-get build-dep foobar" and then very easily compile your foobar yourself without having to worry about finding every header package that you need for compiling the app (something I find incredibly annoying on e.g. RHEL). Also, you can for most of the time install debian unstable packages as well if you're very impatient with getting packages not yet available for ubuntu.
You should. Since Sun very recently relicenced Java to make binary distribution easier, Ubuntu was one of the earliest to put Java in their repositories. sudo apt-get install sun-java5-bin is about as easy as installing Java can get.
1 The whole Spatial browsing idea:
-------
Not the default in any longer in any distro using 2.14.
2 Poor keyboard support:
--------
Simply incorrect. Writing a filename works perfecly not only in nautilus but in open/save dialogs, and indeed in many (in fact almost all) GTK treeviews/lists. Also, have you ever tried Ctrl+L, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+F in Nautilus? Makes life very easy for us keyboard-oriented.
3 Poor right mouse button support. Select some files and try to right click so you can select the "copy" option from the context menu. You can't:
-------
Incorrect. Works like a charm.
4 Similarly when you've got several files/directories on the clipboard and you want to paste them into a folder with a mouse click you can't. The right click once again selects an item etc. etc.
-------
Again, incorrect. You can either do Paste into Folder by right-clicking a folder, or you can do Ctrl+1 and just click on some free space in the icon view.
1 The whole Spatial browsing idea:
-------
Not the default in any longer in any distro using 2.14,
2 Poor keyboard support:
--------
Simply incorrect. Writing a filename works perfecly not only in nautilus but in open/save dialogs, and indeed in many (in fact almost all) GTK treeviews/lists. Also, have you ever tried Ctrl+L, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+F in Nautilus? Makes life very easy for us keyboard-oriented.
3 Poor right mouse button support. Select some files and try to right click so you can select the "copy" option from the context menu. You can't:
-------
Incorrect. Works like a charm.
4 Similarly when you've got several files/directories on the clipboard and you want to paste them into a folder with a mouse click you can't. The right click once again selects an item etc. etc.
-------
Again, incorrect. You can either do Paste into Folder by right-clicking a folder, or you can do Ctrl+1 and just click on some free space in the icon view.
Nah, you're trolling... You definitely should have a look at Nautilus in 2.14. Integrated searching (including Beagle if available) is hardly an example of reducing feature set in relation to Konqueror, for example. Or for example network browsing and other gnome-vfs goodies are only getting better. Burning CDs/DVDs is extremely easy, drag'n'drop works beautifully across different GNOME apps etc. Or how about regular expression based matching with ctrl+S (which has been around for ages). Also, the spatial mode hasn't been the default since 2.12 at least in Ubuntu, thank god. I personally fail to see compromises for "the masses" or dumbening down in current GNOME releases -- quite the contrary I find the GNOME people are very clearly on the ball in terms of providing power users what the want (Nautilus scripts for example being one nice example), as well as accommodating those who just need the thing to work easily.
What makes research extra hard is that cards sold with similar model names might contain completely different chips inside, depending on the revision. And often the differences between different revisions are rather scarcely documented. Such as that list you showed, it tells nothing about the different variants of 3com Officeconnect 11g's, some of which work fine without ndiswrapper, and some of which don't.
Yes, you're absolutely right. CLI is exactly on the same range of importance as Internet that completely changed how literally billions of people communicate. Microsoft's such a moron for not bringing CLI to Windows. Millions of people have missed out sooo much...
For audio use I've found the easiest&overall best combination to be Ubuntu (Hoary) with some audio-related packages from Sid and some from DeMudi. For example Ardour beta releases for the last few months have normally been packaged into the Sid repository within days, sometimes hours, from the release.
And this all is really easy and flashy to use and administer thanks to the brilliant Ubuntu:)
Exactly! Mixing XML, or any structured document markup languages, into program logic is just loony and just generally bad, bad, bad. The whole point of having a general, structured, hierarchial document structure is to make managing, exchanging and manipulating data easier, not to put your whole program in it.
I think the most horrible example of how XML related technologies can go wrong is the FileMaker Pro XSLT publishing engine, more specifically Filemaker's own extensions. For example sending email via an XSL template has to be the most perverted, craziest idea anyone has ever gotten, not to mention the sites you create with it become cluttered and uncomprehensible after ten minutes of coding.
Quite true. I have it as well, a 1Mb/s broadband + digitv plus on-demand films, Futurama episodes and other good stuff. The tv channels are of really good image and sound quality (although not as good as the "normal" digitv in here), but some of the on-demand streamed stuff are a bit crappy.
Lol, your characterization of Finnish transportation system is a bit offending.:) And, as somebody actually already pointed out on this thread, they don't get "passed on", but instead their service is postponed.
Seriously, though, as funny as this piece of news sounds, it's still quite important in my opinion, as it's showing both that Internet addiction is considered a medical condition, and also that it's considered quite a harsh one.
Making stem cells to specialize into kidney cells is not quite as hard as producing functional neurons and making their growth cones migrate exactly where wanted -- The "wires" aren't the biggest problem, it's the signaling that takes place to connect the wires into something that has a wanted physiological meaning.
And there's very active research going into understanding nerve cell targeting. The problem is just that the successful process of nerve cell growth is a result of a fine balance of a huge number of extracellular signals -- different guidance cues, repelling signals, survival factors, cell-to-cell adherence molecules, etc, etc. The basis is known, but it also appears to be one huge area of intracellular signaling research to cover.
There's normally a reason for having a tight regulation of muscle growth in animals, as there's a reason for regulating cell divisions and changes that lead to growth and proliferation overall in all sorts of multicellular organisms (otherwise you'd be just a big blob of tumour).
So, taking out that regulatory protein myostatin will not perhaps be the healthies thing to do if you want to increase muscle size, as you'll just probably end up getting a heart-attack and all sorts of other nasty muscular problems with the most essential muscle tissues you have (heart and intestine at least). This sort of issues occur in GM-modified cattle with the similar myostatin mutation very regularly, and human as another not-too-distant mammal will probably not be any more safe from these problems.
Exactly. This is one of the areas where major distributors should be aggressive and package these windows compatibility related products with their distro -- it would do good for them and us. Having even a rough outo-of-the-box Windows app compatibility would be a good reason for many people to buy a distribution (and even pay slightly more for it).
Whoops, there's a bit of a mistake in there, that makes the logic founder a bit. I was supposed to say: "... and DO NOT change back to KDE/Windows/whatever". Whoops, sorry about that.
If this thing is bugging people as it really does seem to be, it should be a rather clear hint for the Gnome developers to at least give that _easy_ way of setting it to work in a more familiar way to how it used to be.
I also find it hilarious that this article actually gives the message that users are just being a bit simple and hinder innovation because they hate spatial browsing. Well, as I at least see it, there's more to usability of a computer program than the familiarity of its paradigms with normal-life situations (e.g. of how you'd think of a folder and then a directory as a folder). I honestly don't think that giving users something they've been used to in real life is automatically the most innovative, ergonomic and natural thing to do.
And in fact, if you think about the idea of a folder, it is not consistent with the idea of the spatially browsed Nautilus folders -- you don't have folders inside real-life folders, and if you did, finding information from them would be rather clumsy, if you'd have to open up one and reveal all the other folders inside it, just to take again one of them, and so on. You'd end up with a horrible messy pile of folders on your desktop, which is exactly what happens with the spatial Nautilus.
And no matter what you personally think about this whole issue, already the fact that there is something as controversial as this on such a fundamental level of using the GNOME desktop environment shows that no collective usability increase has been achieved. As far as I can see it, an user interface with which a huge number of people are supposed to work with (as a file manager surely is), there should be no reason to have half the people hating it and some loving it dearly. The ones who love it so dearly could turn this innovative feature on, and the ones that are put off by it, would not be exposed to it and change back to KDE/Windows/whatever. And if this thing really is the next big thing with file manager user interfaces, it would take over anyway with the people who actually want to change their way of organising information and browsing it.
I guess in the end what I'm trying to say is that in my opinion forcing very radical usability changes down your throat doesn't actually do any good to the usability.
Because Sun has a strong brand in Java (which certainly does not only consist of a programming language) that it is using in promoting its desktop product, as it should. And Linux in their view is just the platform _for now_ (the additional tools they have built onto their Linux desktop product are built on Java, naturally, e.g. their media player). Which is rather natural for a company that has an own, long-standing and succesful (at least used to be:) flavour of unix available for multiple hardware platforms...They could change the kernel and the simpler ones of us wouldn't even notice (not quite yet on x86, because of the lack of hw driverts).
Besides, a company using a GPL'd program completely legally in their product is not obliged to be politically correct with the community by their naming conventions. Their contributions to the open source community speak rather clearly for themselves, and they should not be mistaken for a let's-just-be-evil company because of their rather complex policy on Linux and open source.
Here's a SUSE mirror list:http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/ftp/i nt_mirrors.html Find the nearest mirror and browse to 9.1/i386 (and similarly the contribs are found from those mirrors) whatever and set it up in Yast. Should be rather self-explanatory. Personally what I think about distributions that support this type of installation from ftp/http/etc is that there should be some sort of semiautomatic configuration of suitable security update mirrors and other packages during the installation. At least I install everything from the internet instead of looking for that dvd that I've lost somewhere on my desk. With the security updates it is not only convenient, but also quite important.
It was also a little bizarre to install a Linux and find out that it didn't include gcc and make. I realize that Personal is targeted at home users, but it just feels strange.
You're mistaken. They are included, they just have to be chosen during installation (maybe you didn't choose any development-related options during installation?)
OTOH I'm not sure how flexible the installer is. For instance, there didn't seem to be any way to do a non-default partitioning scheme, preserve some partitions, install GRUB, etc.; but maybe the option was there, and I just didn't notice it.
All of the mentioned things are available, or at least used to be. I've not tried SUSE 9.1 very profoundly myself yet (not on my own comp yes, except with a live cd), but in 9.0 at least you can choose betw. GRUB and Lilo, configure both of em. And the partitioning tool handles customized partition setups well, you just have to choose the Advanced option when installing, or something on the lines of that...
And quite contrary to the normal misconceptions, you won't cause yourself any problems by mixing your manual conf-file editing with Yast's functionality (any more than you could cause problems with making mistakes in conf files anyways). The autogenerated ones you shouldn't touch are always marked with a comment in the beginning and nearly always in those cases there's another file included with that conf file with which you can meddle as much as you want:)
That's a bit trollish. SUSE's own binary repository plus the contrib repo is vast, it's really hard to find packages that aren't included. And there are other unofficial repositories if you're not happy with SUSE's.
Besides, by principle, I can't really see anything wrong with providing automatically dependency-aware installation tool with RPMs? That'not even any RH & SUSE specific approach. Especially when the one in SuSE works so well, I don't really see any reason to mock RPM-based packaging systems... And as everybody keeps repeating, it's not even proprietary at all.
Being well documented, stable and easy to use does not make SUSE a newbie distro. In fact, it's very much far from being _just_ an easy first glimpse into Linux.
What I hate the most in scientific debates are those people whose arguments are both heated and unknowledgeable. Junk DNA is something of a junk word if you ask from a real geneticist, as many examples of regulatory and other types of function have been attributed to the non-protein-coding regions of the genome.
This is because your personal DNA sequence is not just the blueprints for all your components, it also works as a script to trigger synthesis of these components at a right place and time -- as a response to extra- and intracellular signals. And some of the non-protein-encoding regions are very well known to function in the required regulation. And also, some of the other "non-functional" (already a misleading term) part of the genome can be categorised to quite a few different origins and functions, e.g. the spacer DNA which is thought to be there for causing correct folding of the chromosome for certain regulatory proteins to bind and thus cause or inhibit transcription of a gene/genes. In fact, it's these highly complex and far-reaching regulatory areas of the genome that make e.g. higher animals such a lot more complex and "advanced", not the evolution of the gene products.
And how about the maths? Have you ever heard of the algorithms developed for DNA/RNA/protein sequence analysis? Or the whole field of systems biology, that tries to understand and predict cellular mechanisms purely with mathematical models? Which is certainly not the easiest applications of mathematics... Besides, for some parts of biology/biochemistry/genetics it is quite true that mathematical knownledge of a researcher doesn't have to be top-knotch (it does have to be decent for any scientist, though!), because of the quite evident experimental side of things. If you look at biology as opposed to e.g. particle physics, as biologists we're still rather in the data-gathering, catergorising phase of the science instead of predicting and synthesizing phase. Which means that we also need those for which the microscope is a more applicable tool than knowledge of mathematical models.
I do know how to do it with 'Browse Folder', and I also do know how to revert the behaviour permamently. And I agree with you in that it is not too hard to do for somebody who has even a rough understanding of the whole thing. In fact, I agree with almost everything you've just said:) Except for the fact that an option in the preferences would not only be nice, but it is quite important to those of us for which the problem is not just a matter of spending a few minutes looking for the option from where it should not be-- those simpletons, for which the system should with the current philosophy be fitted for, too.
I have to agree with you. After using Gnome 2.4 and being rather happy with it, it came as quite a grave dissapointment of how a simple flaw in one of programs included could mess up the whole desktop environment -- changing the default behaviour in Nautilus is not unforgiveable in any way, but not giving an easy way to revert to the way it used to work is ignorant and arrogant from the developers. It is not as if having the very familiar 2.4ish file system browsing would be some sort of very obscure need that only a few people would want.
It is such a shame, as I use many of the Gnome 2.6 programs very frequently and like the idea and feel of the simple, clear and usable design in almost all of the programs that are included -- and still have to choose to use KDE as the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
ubuntu-desktop is just a metapackage that has dependencies to basically all desktop apps that are installed by default in Ubuntu (so that for example if you do a minimal install you can later on just do a "desktop installation" later on very easily (e.g. sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop). So you can remove ubuntu-desktop safely and everything will work just fine (which you would find out also if you read the package description of gnome-desktop).
Also, one particularly useful feature I've found with ubuntu/debian package handling is in cases where you need/want a slightly newer version of an application that's not yet available in the repositories with the version you want, you can do "sudo apt-get build-dep foobar" and then very easily compile your foobar yourself without having to worry about finding every header package that you need for compiling the app (something I find incredibly annoying on e.g. RHEL). Also, you can for most of the time install debian unstable packages as well if you're very impatient with getting packages not yet available for ubuntu.
You should. Since Sun very recently relicenced Java to make binary distribution easier, Ubuntu was one of the earliest to put Java in their repositories. sudo apt-get install sun-java5-bin is about as easy as installing Java can get.
Sorry, forgot the HTML formatting...
1 The whole Spatial browsing idea:
-------
Not the default in any longer in any distro using 2.14.
2 Poor keyboard support:
--------
Simply incorrect. Writing a filename works perfecly not only in nautilus but in open/save dialogs, and indeed in many (in fact almost all) GTK treeviews/lists. Also, have you ever tried Ctrl+L, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+F in Nautilus? Makes life very easy for us keyboard-oriented.
3 Poor right mouse button support. Select some files and try to right click so you can select the "copy" option from the context menu. You can't:
-------
Incorrect. Works like a charm.
4 Similarly when you've got several files/directories on the clipboard and you want to paste them into a folder with a mouse click you can't. The right click once again selects an item etc. etc.
-------
Again, incorrect. You can either do Paste into Folder by right-clicking a folder, or you can do Ctrl+1 and just click on some free space in the icon view.
1 The whole Spatial browsing idea: ------- Not the default in any longer in any distro using 2.14, 2 Poor keyboard support: -------- Simply incorrect. Writing a filename works perfecly not only in nautilus but in open/save dialogs, and indeed in many (in fact almost all) GTK treeviews/lists. Also, have you ever tried Ctrl+L, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+F in Nautilus? Makes life very easy for us keyboard-oriented. 3 Poor right mouse button support. Select some files and try to right click so you can select the "copy" option from the context menu. You can't: ------- Incorrect. Works like a charm. 4 Similarly when you've got several files/directories on the clipboard and you want to paste them into a folder with a mouse click you can't. The right click once again selects an item etc. etc. ------- Again, incorrect. You can either do Paste into Folder by right-clicking a folder, or you can do Ctrl+1 and just click on some free space in the icon view.
Nah, you're trolling... You definitely should have a look at Nautilus in 2.14. Integrated searching (including Beagle if available) is hardly an example of reducing feature set in relation to Konqueror, for example. Or for example network browsing and other gnome-vfs goodies are only getting better. Burning CDs/DVDs is extremely easy, drag'n'drop works beautifully across different GNOME apps etc. Or how about regular expression based matching with ctrl+S (which has been around for ages). Also, the spatial mode hasn't been the default since 2.12 at least in Ubuntu, thank god. I personally fail to see compromises for "the masses" or dumbening down in current GNOME releases -- quite the contrary I find the GNOME people are very clearly on the ball in terms of providing power users what the want (Nautilus scripts for example being one nice example), as well as accommodating those who just need the thing to work easily.
What makes research extra hard is that cards sold with similar model names might contain completely different chips inside, depending on the revision. And often the differences between different revisions are rather scarcely documented. Such as that list you showed, it tells nothing about the different variants of 3com Officeconnect 11g's, some of which work fine without ndiswrapper, and some of which don't.
I agree. You should try out OpenOffice 2 beta as they've fixed this. That is, you can now get 65535 rows in a spreadsheet.
Yes, you're absolutely right. CLI is exactly on the same range of importance as Internet that completely changed how literally billions of people communicate. Microsoft's such a moron for not bringing CLI to Windows. Millions of people have missed out sooo much...
For audio use I've found the easiest&overall best combination to be Ubuntu (Hoary) with some audio-related packages from Sid and some from DeMudi. For example Ardour beta releases for the last few months have normally been packaged into the Sid repository within days, sometimes hours, from the release.
:)
And this all is really easy and flashy to use and administer thanks to the brilliant Ubuntu
Exactly! Mixing XML, or any structured document markup languages, into program logic is just loony and just generally bad, bad, bad. The whole point of having a general, structured, hierarchial document structure is to make managing, exchanging and manipulating data easier, not to put your whole program in it.
I think the most horrible example of how XML related technologies can go wrong is the FileMaker Pro XSLT publishing engine, more specifically Filemaker's own extensions. For example sending email via an XSL template has to be the most perverted, craziest idea anyone has ever gotten, not to mention the sites you create with it become cluttered and uncomprehensible after ten minutes of coding.
Quite true. I have it as well, a 1Mb/s broadband + digitv plus on-demand films, Futurama episodes and other good stuff. The tv channels are of really good image and sound quality (although not as good as the "normal" digitv in here), but some of the on-demand streamed stuff are a bit crappy.
Lol, your characterization of Finnish transportation system is a bit offending. :) And, as somebody actually already pointed out on this thread, they don't get "passed on", but instead their service is postponed.
Seriously, though, as funny as this piece of news sounds, it's still quite important in my opinion, as it's showing both that Internet addiction is considered a medical condition, and also that it's considered quite a harsh one.
mz2
Making stem cells to specialize into kidney cells is not quite as hard as producing functional neurons and making their growth cones migrate exactly where wanted -- The "wires" aren't the biggest problem, it's the signaling that takes place to connect the wires into something that has a wanted physiological meaning.
And there's very active research going into understanding nerve cell targeting. The problem is just that the successful process of nerve cell growth is a result of a fine balance of a huge number of extracellular signals -- different guidance cues, repelling signals, survival factors, cell-to-cell adherence molecules, etc, etc. The basis is known, but it also appears to be one huge area of intracellular signaling research to cover.
There's normally a reason for having a tight regulation of muscle growth in animals, as there's a reason for regulating cell divisions and changes that lead to growth and proliferation overall in all sorts of multicellular organisms (otherwise you'd be just a big blob of tumour).
So, taking out that regulatory protein myostatin will not perhaps be the healthies thing to do if you want to increase muscle size, as you'll just probably end up getting a heart-attack and all sorts of other nasty muscular problems with the most essential muscle tissues you have (heart and intestine at least). This sort of issues occur in GM-modified cattle with the similar myostatin mutation very regularly, and human as another not-too-distant mammal will probably not be any more safe from these problems.
Exactly. This is one of the areas where major distributors should be aggressive and package these windows compatibility related products with their distro -- it would do good for them and us. Having even a rough outo-of-the-box Windows app compatibility would be a good reason for many people to buy a distribution (and even pay slightly more for it).
Whoops, there's a bit of a mistake in there, that makes the logic founder a bit. I was supposed to say: "... and DO NOT change back to KDE/Windows/whatever". Whoops, sorry about that.
If this thing is bugging people as it really does seem to be, it should be a rather clear hint for the Gnome developers to at least give that _easy_ way of setting it to work in a more familiar way to how it used to be.
I also find it hilarious that this article actually gives the message that users are just being a bit simple and hinder innovation because they hate spatial browsing. Well, as I at least see it, there's more to usability of a computer program than the familiarity of its paradigms with normal-life situations (e.g. of how you'd think of a folder and then a directory as a folder). I honestly don't think that giving users something they've been used to in real life is automatically the most innovative, ergonomic and natural thing to do.
And in fact, if you think about the idea of a folder, it is not consistent with the idea of the spatially browsed Nautilus folders -- you don't have folders inside real-life folders, and if you did, finding information from them would be rather clumsy, if you'd have to open up one and reveal all the other folders inside it, just to take again one of them, and so on. You'd end up with a horrible messy pile of folders on your desktop, which is exactly what happens with the spatial Nautilus.
And no matter what you personally think about this whole issue, already the fact that there is something as controversial as this on such a fundamental level of using the GNOME desktop environment shows that no collective usability increase has been achieved. As far as I can see it, an user interface with which a huge number of people are supposed to work with (as a file manager surely is), there should be no reason to have half the people hating it and some loving it dearly. The ones who love it so dearly could turn this innovative feature on, and the ones that are put off by it, would not be exposed to it and change back to KDE/Windows/whatever. And if this thing really is the next big thing with file manager user interfaces, it would take over anyway with the people who actually want to change their way of organising information and browsing it.
I guess in the end what I'm trying to say is that in my opinion forcing very radical usability changes down your throat doesn't actually do any good to the usability.
Because Sun has a strong brand in Java (which certainly does not only consist of a programming language) that it is using in promoting its desktop product, as it should. And Linux in their view is just the platform _for now_ (the additional tools they have built onto their Linux desktop product are built on Java, naturally, e.g. their media player). Which is rather natural for a company that has an own, long-standing and succesful (at least used to be :) flavour of unix available for multiple hardware platforms...They could change the kernel and the simpler ones of us wouldn't even notice (not quite yet on x86, because of the lack of hw driverts).
Besides, a company using a GPL'd program completely legally in their product is not obliged to be politically correct with the community by their naming conventions. Their contributions to the open source community speak rather clearly for themselves, and they should not be mistaken for a let's-just-be-evil company because of their rather complex policy on Linux and open source.
Here's a few places to look for some unofficial repos:S uSE_
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/j.pearson/linux.htm#Pack_
http://scott.exti.net/links.html
Where is SUSE's own repository?
Here's a SUSE mirror list:http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/ftp/i nt_mirrors.html
Find the nearest mirror and browse to 9.1/i386 (and similarly the contribs are found from those mirrors) whatever and set it up in Yast. Should be rather self-explanatory. Personally what I think about distributions that support this type of installation from ftp/http/etc is that there should be some sort of semiautomatic configuration of suitable security update mirrors and other packages during the installation. At least I install everything from the internet instead of looking for that dvd that I've lost somewhere on my desk. With the security updates it is not only convenient, but also quite important.
It was also a little bizarre to install a Linux and find out that it didn't include gcc and make. I realize that Personal is targeted at home users, but it just feels strange.
You're mistaken. They are included, they just have to be chosen during installation (maybe you didn't choose any development-related options during installation?)
OTOH I'm not sure how flexible the installer is. For instance, there didn't seem to be any way to do a non-default partitioning scheme, preserve some partitions, install GRUB, etc.; but maybe the option was there, and I just didn't notice it.
All of the mentioned things are available, or at least used to be. I've not tried SUSE 9.1 very profoundly myself yet (not on my own comp yes, except with a live cd), but in 9.0 at least you can choose betw. GRUB and Lilo, configure both of em. And the partitioning tool handles customized partition setups well, you just have to choose the Advanced option when installing, or something on the lines of that... And quite contrary to the normal misconceptions, you won't cause yourself any problems by mixing your manual conf-file editing with Yast's functionality (any more than you could cause problems with making mistakes in conf files anyways). The autogenerated ones you shouldn't touch are always marked with a comment in the beginning and nearly always in those cases there's another file included with that conf file with which you can meddle as much as you want :)
That's a bit trollish. SUSE's own binary repository plus the contrib repo is vast, it's really hard to find packages that aren't included. And there are other unofficial repositories if you're not happy with SUSE's.
Besides, by principle, I can't really see anything wrong with providing automatically dependency-aware installation tool with RPMs? That'not even any RH & SUSE specific approach. Especially when the one in SuSE works so well, I don't really see any reason to mock RPM-based packaging systems... And as everybody keeps repeating, it's not even proprietary at all.
Being well documented, stable and easy to use does not make SUSE a newbie distro. In fact, it's very much far from being _just_ an easy first glimpse into Linux.
What I hate the most in scientific debates are those people whose arguments are both heated and unknowledgeable. Junk DNA is something of a junk word if you ask from a real geneticist, as many examples of regulatory and other types of function have been attributed to the non-protein-coding regions of the genome.
This is because your personal DNA sequence is not just the blueprints for all your components, it also works as a script to trigger synthesis of these components at a right place and time -- as a response to extra- and intracellular signals. And some of the non-protein-encoding regions are very well known to function in the required regulation. And also, some of the other "non-functional" (already a misleading term) part of the genome can be categorised to quite a few different origins and functions, e.g. the spacer DNA which is thought to be there for causing correct folding of the chromosome for certain regulatory proteins to bind and thus cause or inhibit transcription of a gene/genes. In fact, it's these highly complex and far-reaching regulatory areas of the genome that make e.g. higher animals such a lot more complex and "advanced", not the evolution of the gene products.
And how about the maths? Have you ever heard of the algorithms developed for DNA/RNA/protein sequence analysis? Or the whole field of systems biology, that tries to understand and predict cellular mechanisms purely with mathematical models? Which is certainly not the easiest applications of mathematics... Besides, for some parts of biology/biochemistry/genetics it is quite true that mathematical knownledge of a researcher doesn't have to be top-knotch (it does have to be decent for any scientist, though!), because of the quite evident experimental side of things. If you look at biology as opposed to e.g. particle physics, as biologists we're still rather in the data-gathering, catergorising phase of the science instead of predicting and synthesizing phase. Which means that we also need those for which the microscope is a more applicable tool than knowledge of mathematical models.
I do know how to do it with 'Browse Folder', and I also do know how to revert the behaviour permamently. And I agree with you in that it is not too hard to do for somebody who has even a rough understanding of the whole thing. In fact, I agree with almost everything you've just said :) Except for the fact that an option in the preferences would not only be nice, but it is quite important to those of us for which the problem is not just a matter of spending a few minutes looking for the option from where it should not be-- those simpletons, for which the system should with the current philosophy be fitted for, too.
I have to agree with you. After using Gnome 2.4 and being rather happy with it, it came as quite a grave dissapointment of how a simple flaw in one of programs included could mess up the whole desktop environment -- changing the default behaviour in Nautilus is not unforgiveable in any way, but not giving an easy way to revert to the way it used to work is ignorant and arrogant from the developers. It is not as if having the very familiar 2.4ish file system browsing would be some sort of very obscure need that only a few people would want.
It is such a shame, as I use many of the Gnome 2.6 programs very frequently and like the idea and feel of the simple, clear and usable design in almost all of the programs that are included -- and still have to choose to use KDE as the desktop.
mz2