I am posting again, in a new thread, something I posted at the end of another thread, because I believe there are some points worth debating.
I apologise in advance if I am breaking any rule.
I am also doing this beacause Novell asks for feedback, and here there is some (good one?)

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quote:Originally posted by piratu

SuSE has an excellent product but a bad marketing!

let me explain that :

1. their linux boxed product is too expensive, 90EUR and with 2 releases / year makes it more expensive than WinXP Home

2. Novell must occupy the companie's market and let SuSE be an "independent" product and more opened and community oriented

3. Mandrake is an excellent exemple, SuSE must do the same :
- open a club where for 40EUR / year you'll get some support and download the SuSE linux versions;
- give the possibility to buy only the CD set, only the DVD version, only the manuals, combine them and finally the full and complete pack - as is sold today; but separately is much more cheapper and more interesting (downloaded version must be much cheapper than its CD or DVD single version)

4. translate it in more languages, translate the sites too and forums if needed;

5. releasing all the time a free version, light or stripped down (the way Xandros does with its Open Circulation Edition) disponible on ftp and p2p

6. listen more often people's voices and try to be a cutting edge linux distro!

7. offer much more GAMMING & MULTIMEDIA support!

8. adopt a real package manager like APT4RPM, this will make our lives easier;

... as about the speed ... stability matters first! I don't wnat a fasssst OS that freezes in few seconds

My reply:

I couldn't agree more with points 1 and 3 "give the possibility to buy only the CD set, only the DVD version, only the manuals, combine them and finally the full and complete pack - as is sold today..."
I had only two possibilities: buy the full edition for about 93EUR or order the Update Edition from Amazon.co.uk. I ended up by spending 41EUR to buy from a private the original DVDs only. This money could be in Novell's pocket now.
Point 5: Novell has been doing this: 9.1 was the Personal Edition, 9.2 was the FTP-DVD iso.
Point 6: they are actually *too* cutting edge, and it takes about 2 months every time before you can use a reasonably bugfree release. This time they have really gone over the top: beta quality KDE, alpha quality features like beagle, suspend to disk, Xen...
Point 7: gaming is not bad at all, multimedia support out of the box is very poor, but it is easy to improve it a lot with APT.
Point 8 is really my favorite: I have had to fight against ignorance, stupidity, prejudice, bigotism to show that APT is a great tool and that it can work side by side with YaST (some people are so much against APT because they are too bloody stupid to learn how to use it)

I want to add: put a bittorrent client like BitTornado in the media: these days it is used a lot to download free linux distros, not only warez (Linspire understod this a long while ago)

VERY IMPORTANT: I WANT NOVELL TO GO BACK TO SINGLE LAYER DVDs, AT LEAST UNTIL ALMOST EVERYBODY HAS THE MEANS OF MAKING A BACKUP COPY OF DUAL LAYER DVDs. DVDs DO GET SCRATCHED, AND THE RIGHT TO GIVE COPIES FOR NO GAIN TO RELATIVES AND FRIENDS IS AN EMPTY ONE IF PEOPLE CAN'T TECHNICALLY MAKE COPIES.

I apologize for using capital letters. It is by no means meant as shouting, but as strongly stressing something that personally I find very important.

1. just because they release an update twice a year doesnt mean you have to buy it. doing upgrades througout the year should be good enough. on debian for example i can install the stable released version and never have to get anything else after that, i simple do updates over the internet and im up to date! i dont think it is too expensive for what you get.

2. suse is suse. it is open source and they do take contributions from the community although probably not like other distros

3. just cause something works for one company doesnt mean it will work for another

4. agree

blah blah blah

bottom line is that suse is its own distro. yeah they could do things differently, but why? we can raise these same issues with red hat (why dont they offer a free version (i know, there's fedora), why arent they cheaper, why cant i use apt-get out of the box....). see? all distros are different, if you want them all the same, then there will be only one distro.

if they want feedback I'll give'em feedback!

what works for another company doesn't mean that it'll not works fos SuSE too!

I'd like to contribute, as I did on Mandrake's club since this year (I quit because for the money I payied I didn't get what I wanted) and start looking for another distro and bought a magazine with a SuSE 9.2 FTP vesrion and it convinced me!

I think that the club ideea (or Microsoft's MSDN) ader bad ideeas, where people are paying for a year and getting all (more or less) OS version, docs, tools and so on ....

SuSE must realise that many of home users are using their PC to play games, so they must offer them a chance (a gamer user profile, device drivers - joysticks, game pads, sound cards, accelerated drivers, etc, why not a dedicated section on their web site?)

I do have a dual layer DVD writer, so this feature is good to be used, but it'll be great to have a single layer version (media is much cheaper right now)

what I want best is to integrate apt4rpm in YAST (this will spear us of using synaptic) because is really simpler to use that RPM and smarter (here I like when uninstalling, it really uninstall the unused dependencies too) and why not being the package manager by default?

YAST is a system confihuration tool, apt4rpm is only an advance package manager, that's all! it can be easely integrated in YAST !

what elste I'd like to have installed? here the list :

- a theme manager to take care of almost everything (wallpaper, icons, screen saver, window layout and so on) to permits create more easely themes and apply them; now everithing is done seperately (exemple : I want a KDE theme to transform my desktop in a MAC OS X look on a single click!)

-> an easyer way to monunt windows partitions at install time & after (the installer detected well my NTFS, I choosed to add a FAT32, all went OK but when I logged in it told me "no entry in /etc/fstab for this partiton" )

-> a graphical way to activate/deactivate daemons in YAST (some like services in windoze)

-> out of the box we must have what we choosed to install, if it's a workstation I'd like to find ready to work :
* office suite + personal finance manager + something like M$ Access
* web navigator + pluggins (I use Opera)
* mail client
* messenger
* media player (audio & video)
* CD/DVD burning software
* file manager (I adore Total Commander under windows, something like that)
* a graphical partition manager with the installer (something capable like Acronis Disc Director Suite for example)
* a image backup tool (like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image)
* a backup tool (tape, zip drive, cd, dvd, external disc drive)
* pictures viewer (I like XnView)
* antivirus with GUI
* firewall with GUI
* antispam tool
* a easyer way on installing software (back again to apt here ...)
* an image manipulation program (GIMP is perfect!)
* file archiver/compressor with GUI (I like 7-zip and IZArc)
* muzic file ripper & converter

-> when I said more gaming & multimedia support I refered to M$'s DirectX technology, to unifie technologies undes one big library, this to be simpler for people to write games and multimedia applications

-> again : standards, standards, standards! we need to standardize things to make our lives easyer

I have to continue working with 9.3 day by day, me & my wife, and we'll tell woy what we like or not and most of them will be compared to windows

Linux must be easy to use, plug an play, ahead windows and MAC OS X, but in the same time keep its UNIX POWER

jsmarshall85

You can't compare Debian with SUSE.
Debian is totally free and you can have a system as stable or as bleeding edge as you wish.
Right now I am using Kanotix, updated to the latest unstable and with KDE and other bits from experimental.
In Debian there is always continuity. The updates you get from SUSE are very limited.

But anyway that was not the point at all.

"- a theme manager to take care of almost everything (wallpaper, icons, screen saver, window layout and so on) to permits create more easily themes and apply them; now everything is done separately (example : I want a KDE theme to transform my desktop in a MAC OS X look on a single click!)"

I am still far to much of a Linux newbie to post my own review of what I would like to see, but I can say! SuSE would be a perfect Linux OS to have more graphic control over, I still have yet to finish my desktop, but when it is done I will post SS's. The work I have put into figuring out how to make everything clean and sharp, and to ensure that both kde apps and gtk apps look great upon start up has been a pain in the arse! I can't say I don't enjoy the challenge though, I will say that the majority of people I have seen touch Linux and turn away have been because the miss match of fonts, scaling, and working accessibility to options.

I hope to release a guide on my personal experience with SuSE Linux soon, from right after install to the final GUI and user preference set up, but I can't promise anything for awhile, still to many little things that I believe would be easy take a bit to much research to figure out.

“7. offer much more GAMMING & MULTIMEDIA support!”

I ensure you I am not trying to be rude at all! When you say more gamming & multimedia support, to what extent would you like to see SuSE bring more to the table on, more video utilization? I am just curious because I have seen so little serious game opportunities for the Linux desktop. I still am trying to learn the process of running win games under Linux using apps I believe like VMware. ( I just noticed piratu add on that )

For multimedia, it would be very nice if you could start up and have: ( I know you can make all these work after install )

1.) Your correct drivers installed and 3-D support enabled if this is what you wish.
2.) Be able to insert a music CD in your CD-ROM and it play properly. ( Only thing out of these 5 I have not figured out yet )
3.) Listen to mp3’s.
4.) Watch DVD’s.
5.) Play all forms of MS Windows media.

I know this may press on some sort of laws, I just don’t understand how other Distros are able to do them.

Lastly I think it would be very nice to have appropriate chat plug-ins to whatever chat client you use to send files to a MAC, WIN, or BSD box. I personally was so used to sending different files and screen shots across aim without a problem, now whenever I want to show something off, or send a family snapshot, it can be quite an inconvenience.

In the end, I enjoy the SuSE Distro to great means ups and downs included, for me it has become one of those things once you start you can never go back to what you were using, if you are truly dedicated to learning and growing within any Unix like OS it seems the possibilities are endless and you acquire so much knowledge down the road of almost any tasks.

Disclaimer: Mind you I am in no way Bias to any cooperation or operating system !

"muzic file ripper & converter"

Missed this one, another thing I am working on, but due to my problems with playing music CDs at the moment I have held off on.

What is the standard CD ripping tool for SuSE?
What is the standard audio converting tool for SuSE ( .mp3 -> .wav )?

JaySuSE

JaySuSE

It is possible to do most of the things you mention about multimedia by adding extra support (applications) with apt4rpm for SUSE:

http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/