It's almost a month openSUSE 10.3 was released, and having used it since
the beginning, I think it's time for some comment about the distribution
in general and on my favourite desktop environment, GNOME, in
particular. It's a bit long, but well, I hope not too boring ;-)
About the distribution, great improvements were obtained concerning boot
time and the package manager, which is now in a usable, even though not
perfect state. The new media selection made the distribution more
accessible, thanks to the 1 CD installation, and the 1 click install
significantly simplified the installation procedure. All these new
features improved the user experience a lot, left me quite impressed,
and increased the interest in the distribution thanks also to the new
communication medium represented by news.opensuse.org.
However, these very positive elements, which I think puts 10.3 at a good
distance from 10.2, are somewhat reduced in their importance but issues
caused mainly by lack of attention and care in details after the
release.
I'm mainly thinking to:
* The release of broken java packages, which are now somewhat
fixed on systems which didn't install the broken patch, leaving
others to fix it manually.
* Issues with kernel upgrades and nvidia drivers kmp's, reported
on IRC and forums by some user.
* The, in my opinion wrong, choice to prepare a kmp with the
newest ATI driver, which doesn't support older cards, without
adopting a solution as nvidia did.
About GNOME, I was initially positively impressed by GNOME in openSUSE
10.3 for various positive elements brought in this release, such as the
new updater applet and YaST-GTK which provide a better integration
between classical SUSE features and the GNOME desktop environment. These
things, together with the fresher look due to the green artwork, the
main menu and the international clock taken from SLED SP1, are great
improvements and improved the impression openSUSE 10.3 had on the
public.
However, after almost a month I use openSUSE, I think there are still
major issues, which might prevent users to use it, and should be fixed
soon. Here is some example, but a simple search in bugzilla list all of
them.
* Using GNOME after the first login/logout is annoying or
impossible because:
* The launchers in main-menu are slow or not responding at
all (The standard menu is working).
* YaST has similar issues to main-menu. Modules do not
start or start after a long delay since when clicked.
* Logout/shutdown functionalities are not working anymore
and suspend/standby buttons are grayed out.
* There are lacking dependencies for applets, like the deskbar
(Bug 328912, reported before release) or others, for which a
patch still has to come (python dependency lacks), while the
bug, reported in beta 2, is marked as fixed in bugzilla.
* Anjuta is obsolete (Provided version 1.2.4a - Available version
2.2.2), and the provided version starts up with 3 error
messages. The bug was reported in beta 2 and was fixed in
GNOME:STABLE, upgrading to 2.2.2, but a patch still has to come.
* Evolution crashes when doing common operations like selecting
contacts category (Bug 335546), has issues with Exchange (Bug
328149, found before release), and lacks of some of the most
published features of GNOME 2.20, as the backup feature (Bug
331752).
* Gedit is compiled without python support (Bug 299546), while it
has python support on other distributions (read Fedora, to cite
one).
* Bug-buddy is dumbed down, without the possibility of reporting
bugs (Bug 307860, reported in beta 2).
I think bug reporters and testers did their job during the development
stage, the bug slashing weekend and the community contribution to 10.3
were probably the biggest since the birth of the project.
As a consequence, I think some more effort to fix at least the most
annoying bugs, some more care in trying patches even with the
cooperation of the community, and a somewhat less restrictive approach
to patch releases (we are at "only security stuff" now) should be really
considered.
P.S. Sorry for the cross-post on gnome and factory :-)
With kind regards,
Alberto
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