I have been running with a 10.3 openSUSE system updated to FACTORY for some time now, but last week, I downloaded the boot ISO to test a fresh installation. And I was immediately delighted by the new installer, which seems to be the same as always but with a much better UI.
It looks very crappy. Why don’t you just use Anaconda?
But is uses Qt…
What’s the sense of using Qt on GNOME CD?
@rafel: Anaconda is much nicer 🙂 !
Yeah, uses QT, and that why it looked a bit out of place before. With the new QT theme, it looks completely different, like an installer, and not like an out-of-place app for a GNOME CD.
As for using QT, that’s just a simple dependency for the GNOME CD, so nothing really big and important, IMO. It could look better with GTK? maybe, but the installer works pretty well, and now looks great, so I see no point in rewriting it just for removing a tiny dependency on the GNOME CD.
Are you crazy? Qt on GNOME CD? It’s useless dependency.
GTK provides nice widget for such things, “creator” widget.
Also, eg. SaX2 loads slower than YaST2-GTK on GNOME or XFCE especially because of Qt.
I can’t see why you would want OpenSUSE to provide 2 installers, in particular when the installer allows you to choose between a GNOME or a KDE installation
Well, it looks and feels alien (QT… although I have to agree that it’s kinda pretty) and it crashes at the last stage of hardware detection. It’s Suse alright xD
The crash doesn’t mind me, managed to get my way around it. The desktop is just like openSuse has been for a while. Pretty. The looks of openSuse are divine, it’s the best looking linux desktop from the moment the boot loader has started to the moment when you turn off the power. Just plain wonderful.
Still the same problems though so I’m once more disappointed. Start menu takes sometimes 5-30 seconds to open, then try it again in couple seconds and it’s blazing fast. 5 minutes later it randomly might or might not be fast again.
Some Yast(2) applications simply silenty fail to run even after that su promt. This is hilarious as this obvious BUG has been around at least from Suse 5.2 – from year 1997 when I installed Suse 5.2 as my first distribution for the first time. Simply sometimes these tools do not run properly with su or sudo. Period. Log in completely to a fresh desktop and they do. Log out, back to the user that is wheel’d and… Bullshit.
The software repositories are still hypocritic about the most important pieces software – multimedia codecs. Bleh.
Back to some better distro.. Like.. Anything else.
Fedora has better repos – they do not provide non-free packages (because of patents and licences), but everything non-free can be easily installed with livna repo, which contains everything non-free (codecs, drivers, etc).
@M.Pomme
“I can’t see why you would want OpenSUSE to provide 2 installers, in particular when the installer allows you to choose between a GNOME or a KDE installation”
Because you’re not so smart. openSUSE provides GNOME-CD and KDE-CD. GNOME CD shouldn’t provide any KDE packages or dependent by KDE packages.
Firstly, Anaconda looks completely horrible and is very inflexble; I really can’t imagine what the people above were thinking when they said that. If you can find me just one non-RH user who would agree that it’s better looking than the above SUSE installer I’d be incredibly surprised.
troll: it’s *ALPHA 1*. If you’re not expecting a crash around the place you should re-examine what you think Alpha means.
Some YaST modules fail to start? Which ones? Obviously this was not the case in the stable release, and I still doubt it’s the case in the Alpha 1 (haven’t noticed any).
> The software repositories are still hypocritic about the most important pieces software – multimedia codecs. Bleh.
What the heck does hypocritic mean here? MP3 support _is_ available in the official openSUSE repositories. For other things — yes, like the case in most distros, it’s not available out-of-the-box. Know what though? openSUSE has a nice 1-click-install for all multimedia codecs (making it much easier to, say, play a DVD than any other of the popular distros).
Livio: I’m sorry, but I don’t think any reasonable person who has looked at both distributions’ repositories could possibly maintain that the Fedora repos are “better”. The openSUSE Build Service has thousands upon thousands more packages available, and the quality of SUSE packages are very high.
Qt is still on the GNOME CD, GTK is still on the KDE CD. I’m sorry that you disagree, but many people like a mix of applications from both DEs. I’m a KDE user for example but I’m very happy that GIMP is available on the KDE CD.
Actually, all yast2 modules. They work for most of the time.. But then sometimes something seems to “jam” and they simply do not start. On console they whine something about X11. It’s been really literally like that since 1997, and yes I have out of curiosity tried many many versions in the last years – just to recall always nearly instantly why *Suse sucks and switch away.
Not to mention that even when they work those yast2 modules seem to want to initialize half of the universe all over again when they start. Even watching continents move is more interesting and faster. Watching anything yast(2) related start is like watching snails fuck. (I have to say: some of them are actually pretty damned good, after they have initialized and if they start at all.)
Btw, the opensuse 1-click installer thingy lacks many codecs for the gstreamer backend playback. I tested that extensively as well and things like AMR support were missing. Some of those 3rd party repositories are a life saver in that.. Was it umm.. Pacman? Something like that? Their packages always suck for couple months after a release (that liboil mess with 10.2 was a disaster), but after they balance they are aokish already.
And yeah, I know what alpha means. That’s why I test them so I know what to avoid, poke a bit around in bugzillas/etc and see how the final version is forming. Sometimes even post patches, used to run Gentoo BREAKME and do that for fun, hehe. Some distros are doing well and the developers rock.. Some seem just hopeless. Most often it’s openSuse, lol.
Re: yast modules, I have never experienced that and obviously practically everyone never does. Could you file a bug report about it? I find it quite hard to believe…
> Btw, the opensuse 1-click installer thingy lacks many codecs for the gstreamer backend playback.
XINE is recommended by default, but if you hit “advanced” then you have the chance to select GStreamer stuff. I have never heard of AMR though.
Packman will be getting a _lot_ better with creating packages for development versions as they switch to using the build service software. And they already are greatly, to an extent.
[[ XINE is recommended by default, but if you hit “advanced” then you have the chance to select GStreamer stuff. I have never heard of AMR though. ]]
Xine is antic… GStreamer should be preferred, because it’s modern.
You haven’t heard about AMR? Do you have a cellphone?
– Suse needs an installer
– The installer needs a GUI toolkit
– They chose Qt
– ???
– Profit?
Would you prefer motif/lesstif as a “neutral” toolkit?
I was a long time Red Hat and Fedora user (I’ve switched from F7 to OSS 10.3) and I strongly disagree that Fedora have better repos and installer. Speaking about openSUSE and GNOME, OpenSUSE community have made a huge progress with 10.3. All the Yast2 modules were rewritten with gtk2 support, there are lots of GNOME repos, one click technology, openSUSE build service, and Freetype2 with sub-pixel hinting support renders fonts much better than Fedora’s Freetype with sub-pixel hinting support does. And not to mention support for delta rpms which is still not implemented in Fedora. IMHO openSUSE is a much better choice for a desktop user, and not only for a desktop user. Don’t get me wrong, I still like Fedora very much and I’m very interested in what they’re doing, but I find openSUSE 10.3 as much better choice for myself. And I’d like to mention that I’ve never liked SUSE very much till 10.3.
Speaking about the new installer, I like it very much and I don’t see any problem with that small qt dependency. Like most of users, I also mix KDE and GNOME apps and I think that openSUSE developers have good approach.
Cheers!
“if you can find me just one non-RH user who would agree that it’s better looking than the above SUSE installer I’d be incredibly surprised.”
Anaconda is way more flexible and the proof is in the number of distributions, even Debian and Gentoo based ones using it. Who uses the suse installer except suse?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Distros
“Livio: I’m sorry, but I don’t think any reasonable person who has looked at both distributions’ repositories could possibly maintain that the Fedora repos are “better”. The openSUSE Build Service has thousands upon thousands more packages available, and the quality of SUSE packages are very high.”
BS. OpenSUSE does not even allow non-Novell people to maintain packages in the official repository and you have to use the so called build service. How open is that? The quality and guidelines for Fedora are way more comprehensive and better.
[[ BS. OpenSUSE does not even allow non-Novell people to maintain packages in the official repository and you have to use the so called build service. How open is that? The quality and guidelines for Fedora are way more comprehensive and better. ]]
And thats the main reason I do not use openSUSE and not contribute to them.
Adding repos only because of main-repo-maintained-only-by-corporation is the most stupid thing… Ubuntu also lacks here…
About openSUSE: they require building packages by root (not recommended by me, because if you make stupid mistake in SPEC you can mess whole your system) and they require making subpackage -lang, which is required by main package (does this have sense?).
Only good thing their doing in their RPMS is opensuse-licences/etc package, which contains almost all OSI-approved licences.