[lug] SUSE- comments

[John Karns]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, J. Wayde Allen uttered:

> On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, ljp wrote:
> 
> > I have just installed SuSE 7, on a spare pc, after using RedHat for years,
> > just to try it out. I just wanted to exchange a few thoughts on it.
> > 1- Nice partitioning program. I think its easier, and better looking than
> > RH's.
> 
> OK, just to be the devil's advocate.  I picked up a copy of SuSE a few
> years back, and since everyone had said that it was very easy for
> beginners I gave it to my wife to see what she thought.  I let her
> install, and kind of watched to see how it went.  When we got to the
> partitioning section, it took a good amount of time for BOTH of us to
> figure out how to make it work.  Yeah, I thought it "looked" pretty, but

I think that they've made some improvements with that.  Although I guess
that I've grown pretty used to it by now too.


> The SuSE system was equally confusing to me.  Lots of screens with options
> that didn't make a lot of sense to me.  Installing a single software
> package (say Octave) as opposed to an entire software category (math) via
> the gui interface in either SuSE or Red Hat always seems to be difficult
> for me.  So far the only package management system that I've found that I

Yast in SuSE 5.1 was pretty lacking in many respects.  But it was also
more or less beta at ver .99 or so.

Yast has a very nice feature in that it shows the failed dependencies, and
where to find them in the pkg category menu.  Then it provides an option
to auto-select all pkg's to satisfy the failed deps.  If in turn those
pkg's have more failed deps you can auto-select those.  Sort of a
cascading chain reaction kind of situation.  Very nice, and they've had
that now for quite some time.  Perhaps RH has that sort of thing now as
well.


> My guess is that it took longer since SuSE installs kind of what you
> want plus a lot more.

I haven't confirmed this with v. 7 yet, but with the earlier versions
(including 6.4) after selecting the desired system type (Minimal
base, network oriented, etc.) you had to choose the "Replace" button at
the bottom of the screen.  This would lead to a yes or no confirmation to
de-select many of the default pre-selected pkg's.  This is a very obscure
caveat and confuses a lot of people.  One of Yast's big weaknesses IMO.


> like is Debian's.  In the Debian system you simply use the arrow key to
> highlight the Octave package, hit the "+" key, and then hit return.

Debian sounds very nice.  I wish I had been able to get it installed when
I tried back about 4 yrs ago.  One of it's great strengths, from what I
gather, is the ease of updating the system.  But for this to be a pay-off
it's also a big advantage to have access to a high-speed Inet connection,
which many of us more unfortuates don't have!  :_(


> In general I guess I think that all of this kind of runs into an
> interesting dilemma.  When you make a system that is programmed to do
> things in a specific way by hitting certain buttons (gui interface) it
> seems you give up some of the flexibility of the Unix building block
> approach.  Basically the user interface ends up wrapping the building
> blocks, and to change the structure you have to figure out how to
> deconstruct the interface in order to change the way the building blocks
> are ordered or configured.

Indeed.  meeting the challenge of making a complex OS such as Linux
adaptable to a wider base than just us techies calls for striking a
balance (at least within the UI) between flexibility and accessibility and
is a difficult task.  But I think things are proceding very well along
these lines, as I haven't really felt too constrained by the user
interface.  The real power and elegance of this OS lies in the the fact
that I can always edit the necessary config files directly as needed,
while being able to take advantage of the UI to suit my taste.  I find it
truly remarkable just how much Linux has evolved.  And it's only going to
get better!

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John Karns                                              jkarns at csd.net