Stop comparing apples and oranges; automated dependency management is separate to the package manager. openSUSE has Zypper, for example, which does fantastic dep checking and resolution.
Lots of recent innovation has been happening in RPM anyway -- the move to LZMA compression in some places for smaller packages and faster decompression is a good example.
It's thoroughly disappointing to see a team of programmers only able to produce releases for Debian-based systems – the "couple of distros" referred to in the story are Ubuntu and Debian. It's also a huge hassle getting it to compile because it's such an enormous download from SVN (gigabytes, I believe; I gave up when it got to 480 megs).
Make it a little easier to test please, guys.
I remember lining up A-level... papers from the 80s and 90s, you could see the questions get easier almost year-by-year. Interestingly, did you compare the Further Mathematics papers?
I sat Maths and Further Maths A-levels last year. Whereas the Maths syllabus that was fiddled with almost annually got easier, the difficulty of Further Maths has stayed pretty much static; we regularly practiced papers from over half a century ago.
That is why most quality universities -- while not mandating Further Maths as not all schools can teach it -- look highly favourably on it, and most serious mathematicians that I know studied it.
I really can't believe this debate (and the same "yeah, me too!") still comes up and gets modded insightful all the time. The point is not that Christianity's God wants you to worship him through his own insecurity, but that the bible says that the natural state for humans is to worship him -- that humans are happiest when they do so.
I do not see where I said (1), so I'm not sure what you're responding to.
As for (2), Shuttleworth may indeed be a lovely person in real life. The rest of us can only form our opinions of him on what he shows to the public -- what he says on forums and interviews and the like. He has clearly shown himself to be of debatable decorum (the "open letter" to SuSE developers, for example, and the untruthful statements in interviews).
It call it hyped because (having used it, of course) I see nothing intuitive or 'killer'. What Ubuntu has done to make it so successful is a) excellent marketing and b) made it very easy for newbies to use and contribute to. The second point is particularly important -- everyone can "feel involved" doing just things like screencasting. Maybe the low entry barrier is why Slashdot users are so fond of it;-)
Don't make me laugh. Novell hire far, far more open source developers than Canonical, contrary to what Shuttleworth states in a recent interview with him. My favourite one there is "Google uses Ubuntu on all of their developer desktops" (emphasis mine). That is outright false, as even Shuttleworth himself has said.
Soon Ubuntu will not even need users -- it will run completely on hype.
Do you have any examples of how openSUSE has been crippled by Microsoft? It has already been pointed out further up that this article was _clearly_ either written by someone trying to spread FUD or by someone who just isn't very knowledgable (subpixel hinting is a freetype setting that the freetype developers themselves suggest disabling for distros).
It is quite funny to see so many people jumping on the bandwagon, attempting to find 'omgz evil' in Novell because they made a business deal with Microsoft; obviously a deal that turns out to have done them more bad than good in the eyes of the community.
"If they do one of the free variants of those (Fedora or OpenSuse) there are stability issues.... OpenSuse 10.2 was more stable but the European repositories were often down."
You mention stability issues (because the stability of Linux is something we all love), and then go on to say that OpenSUSE has stability issues because some of the European repositories were often down? Which repositories? I've never had troubles using heanet or skynet, and always download at max speed.
People can and should be as pro their-distro as they like! It's the ignorant SUSE hate from people trying to look cool in front of their 1337 slashdot homies that's stupid.
It's not faux Linux just because the company that founded it have some kind of business deal with Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft is evil, but what the hell has that got to do with openSUSE?
I know it's cool to be anti-SUSE and pro-Ubuntu (particularly on slashdot), but face it: it's an excellent, openly-developed, mature distro, and Novell have contributed far, far more significantly to open source than Shuttleworth. The PR machine that is Mark Shuttleworth may sponsor a bunch of high visibility things but it's Novell that are out there employing open source developers full time.
Good MSN with all smileys, filetransfer, videochat. I think these people must have missed Kopete. Using a nifty script you can download the official icons from the MSN server and use them without a problem. It has had file transfer support for ages now, and has acquired webcam support quite recently.
Support for all streaming media in your webbrowser. Mplayer-plugin is a Mozilla/Firefox plugin that lets you display Windows Media, QuickTime, MPEG, Ogg Vorbis, and Real format movie clips in your web browser. Works perfectly for me.
Oh yeah, for the transition, full NTFS writing support. Moving from NTFS to ext3 or Reiser shouldn't require NTFS write support, should it? With that said, Captive has been providing this for a while.. never used it myself, but I hear good things about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop comparing apples and oranges; automated dependency management is separate to the package manager. openSUSE has Zypper, for example, which does fantastic dep checking and resolution. Lots of recent innovation has been happening in RPM anyway -- the move to LZMA compression in some places for smaller packages and faster decompression is a good example.
It's thoroughly disappointing to see a team of programmers only able to produce releases for Debian-based systems – the "couple of distros" referred to in the story are Ubuntu and Debian. It's also a huge hassle getting it to compile because it's such an enormous download from SVN (gigabytes, I believe; I gave up when it got to 480 megs). Make it a little easier to test please, guys.
I really can't believe this debate (and the same "yeah, me too!") still comes up and gets modded insightful all the time. The point is not that Christianity's God wants you to worship him through his own insecurity, but that the bible says that the natural state for humans is to worship him -- that humans are happiest when they do so.
I do not see where I said (1), so I'm not sure what you're responding to. As for (2), Shuttleworth may indeed be a lovely person in real life. The rest of us can only form our opinions of him on what he shows to the public -- what he says on forums and interviews and the like. He has clearly shown himself to be of debatable decorum (the "open letter" to SuSE developers, for example, and the untruthful statements in interviews). It call it hyped because (having used it, of course) I see nothing intuitive or 'killer'. What Ubuntu has done to make it so successful is a) excellent marketing and b) made it very easy for newbies to use and contribute to. The second point is particularly important -- everyone can "feel involved" doing just things like screencasting. Maybe the low entry barrier is why Slashdot users are so fond of it ;-)
Don't make me laugh. Novell hire far, far more open source developers than Canonical, contrary to what Shuttleworth states in a recent interview with him. My favourite one there is "Google uses Ubuntu on all of their developer desktops" (emphasis mine). That is outright false, as even Shuttleworth himself has said.
Soon Ubuntu will not even need users -- it will run completely on hype.
Do you have any examples of how openSUSE has been crippled by Microsoft? It has already been pointed out further up that this article was _clearly_ either written by someone trying to spread FUD or by someone who just isn't very knowledgable (subpixel hinting is a freetype setting that the freetype developers themselves suggest disabling for distros). It is quite funny to see so many people jumping on the bandwagon, attempting to find 'omgz evil' in Novell because they made a business deal with Microsoft; obviously a deal that turns out to have done them more bad than good in the eyes of the community.
"If they do one of the free variants of those (Fedora or OpenSuse) there are stability issues .... OpenSuse 10.2 was more stable but the European repositories were often down."
You mention stability issues (because the stability of Linux is something we all love), and then go on to say that OpenSUSE has stability issues because some of the European repositories were often down? Which repositories? I've never had troubles using heanet or skynet, and always download at max speed.
People can and should be as pro their-distro as they like! It's the ignorant SUSE hate from people trying to look cool in front of their 1337 slashdot homies that's stupid.
It's not faux Linux just because the company that founded it have some kind of business deal with Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft is evil, but what the hell has that got to do with openSUSE? I know it's cool to be anti-SUSE and pro-Ubuntu (particularly on slashdot), but face it: it's an excellent, openly-developed, mature distro, and Novell have contributed far, far more significantly to open source than Shuttleworth. The PR machine that is Mark Shuttleworth may sponsor a bunch of high visibility things but it's Novell that are out there employing open source developers full time.
Good MSN with all smileys, filetransfer, videochat.
I think these people must have missed Kopete.
Using a nifty script you can download the official icons from the MSN server and use them without a problem. It has had file transfer support for ages now, and has acquired webcam support quite recently.
Support for all streaming media in your webbrowser.
Mplayer-plugin is a Mozilla/Firefox plugin that lets you display Windows Media, QuickTime, MPEG, Ogg Vorbis, and Real format movie clips in your web browser. Works perfectly for me.
Oh yeah, for the transition, full NTFS writing support.
Moving from NTFS to ext3 or Reiser shouldn't require NTFS write support, should it? With that said, Captive has been providing this for a while.. never used it myself, but I hear good things about it.
Happy?