I have just spent two days fiddling with 11.2. I have tried every version after 10.3 which I currently use on four different desktops. 11.2 seems like a step in the right direction, especially the vastly improved YaST. But what I can’t face is the amount of effort I have to put into re-installing all my favorite applications that aren’t included in the distribution and that frequently need to be configured ALL OVER AGAIN. All the minor glitches. Like why does a particular radio station play on an older version of a player but not on the newer one? And why do I have to “fix” the newer one.
So here is my definition of what an installation should do.
You slip the DVD into the drive and walk away. Some time later you come to your monitor and see exactly what you saw the last time you booted it. Everything looks and works EXACTLY the same. But now when you start anything, the new OS allows you to look into another window where the new installation is running the same application using its “suggested” method and display. At this point after evaluating the new method you can choose which one to make active. Does that sound like a VM based project?
The advantage. Not having to learn something you are going to re-learn at the next update. I’ve been computing for over 35 years. I don’t know how many different editors/word processors I’ve had to learn to use. I would guess more than 30. But you know what? They all do the same thing, put a letter on a piece of paper.
Yes but you can upgrade Windows and face the exact same issues.
I have “upgraded” many windows computers from XP to Vista and had the same issues you did.
Originally Posted by ionmich
I have just spent two days fiddling with 11.2. I have tried every version … 11.2 seems like a step in the right direction, especially the vastly improved YaST. But what I can’t face is the amount of effort I have to put into re-installing all my favorite applications that aren’t included in the distribution and that frequently need to be configured ALL OVER AGAIN.
If you were doing an upgrade, the upgrade IMHO should fully see your current system and pattern itself squarely in line with that analogy. A fresh install is a different story. A migration tool would be in order to copy current system to alternate media and after the install migrate it selectively back.
This is one of my pet peeves about making upgrades. When things are working do I risk breakage and fixes over production to stay current or skip upgrades to stay productive. The latter wins in many cases.
Less than 10% of the apps I want to use work under 11.1 but did work under mandrake 9.1. openSUSE as an OS does work far better and app work-arounds are coming but slowly.
You slip the DVD into the drive and walk away. Some time later you come to your monitor and see exactly what you saw the last time you booted it. Everything looks and works EXACTLY the same. But now when you start anything, the new OS allows you to look into another window where the new installation is running the same application using its “suggested” method and display. At this point after evaluating the new method you can choose which one to make active. Does that sound like a VM based project?
Yes that sounds like a VM project. I considered upgrading to 11.2 but after seeing the posts here I am thinking I’d be crazy since I still haven’'t got 11.1 working 100% properly.
Just because M$ does this poor computing practice does not make it right! We are Linux, you know with great power comes great responsibility. M$ doesn’t understand much of it’s own system let alone anyone else’s, but Linux understands all it’s filesystems, can read foldernames, follow links, can see the rpm database to see what has been installed, can see how space is organized.
Well apple also has issues simular to this too, all OS’s have upgrade issues of some kind.
However personally I have had better luck with upgrading linux then i ever did windows.
And to quote the speaker from Apple at last years computer science convention in Chicago … “our direction toward a Unix style system is our best hope to solve deployment problems now and in the future. Some of our design team were leaning towards the Microsoft model but gains achieved through fast deploy followed by a stream of fixes at the expense of our users is exactly what we want to avoid.”
So yes, I agree that all systems have their issues with upgrading. The Windows model has always been to provide the base system with little or no consideration to the end user or their software. Mac OS-X is IMHO a venture towards the power of the Unix system because their closed Apple only approach was being found too restrictive and difficult to offer that which people wanted most … namely real applications.
When I consider an upgrade, I expect to not to lose that which I already have, gain enhancements on what I have, not have to spend a huge amount of time recreating things, and having a fair and reasonable method of restoring my apps. Of the systems I can choose from, Linux based ones hit the target most effectively. The openSUSE 11.1/KDE4.3 being the one so far to work the best.
I am shying away from 11.2 after some of the posts here because:
11.2 does not contain many of the drivers which 11.1 had
11.2 needs the ext4 filesystem when mine is ext3 and is just now starting to work with my plans
I don’t releash the thought of having to re-install apps which were a major pain the first go around
A lot of apps are not included in the repositories as they were in 11.1
too many have complained that video, sound, mouse, keyboard, network, and internet devices are broken
I’ve already been down the road of no internet for month’s because services needed to establish a working internet weren’t in the DVD install so I had to work crippled until I could access the internet to resolve problems
Use of a new filesystem means moving large amounts of data and settings in addition to locating and installing apps needed to be productive.
Apps being dropped from repositories is not a solution.
Therefore, an upgrade to a newer OS version must maintain choices. The ability to 1) either install on ext3 or 2) the ability to hot-build ext4 transferring the ext3 contents onto ext4 then doing the upgrade. The ability to transform the settings for all the current system into the new one. The ability to resolve the software installs and generate a report of all migrated works which could not be satisfied.
It’s this last point that seems highly lacking.>:(
Who said that? It uses ext4 by default, but you can choose ext3 during install. I did for / and it works. I left my /home as it was (ext3) and it works. There is no requirement IMHO.
With your experience of 35 years of computation: sit back, have a cup of coffee or a beer (depending on your timezone) and ask yourself: Is it a reasonable expectation that everything works after a major upgrade of the OS?
I am one of those users who run a lot of exotic non standard packages (j-chkmail, crm114, preproc, txt2pho, mbrola, ecpp - just to name a few) and a couple of drivers which were compiled against the kernel and the current libraries. It is a fact that I have to re-install everything when I switch to the next release of my favorite distribution. Not to mention setting up DNS and websites and databases and crontabs again.
The real quality of a new release is that it allows me to do so, giving me enhanced security and more stability (hopefully, sigh).
Thankyou for the correction, one down :). I got the ext4 from a thread in here and immediately went auggggh! I would have checked into it further but figured they knew what they were saying with all the banter of “see how great this is and how poor that is”
It’s because of my 35 years of computing experience that I feel we should be progressing not digressing. When my deployment of redhat 5.1 became 5.7 then 5.11 and eventually 7.0 the one thing I liked most was the intelligent upgrade that worked hard to limit my downtime. Again going from Mandrake 7.0 thru to Mandrake 9.1 an even more intelligent upgrade that even saved a file containing a list of rpm’s not upgraded and why. openSUSE from 11.0 to 11.1 wasn’t too intelligent on the upgrade part. Yes it worked better than others I have tried, but the upgrade was pretty drowsy.
Do you like re-inventing the wheel? I don’t and I shouldn’t have to if the system does what it should have already learned to do.
When my car engine needs to be repaired, is it reasonable that I should have to go to traffic school to learn how to drive all over again?
When cars first came on the roads an owner had to have a mechanic (also driver) with him to fix all the things that kept going wrong along the roadway. Well cars have changed but computing is still stuck in that period.
I think we are currently living in a time when innovation rules, regardless of the cost in time and resources. Can we not see past that?
Spend some time with rpm(8), build your source that way. Keep the rpm binaries around. You’ll find, that 9/10 times something you compiled for OS 10.3, will run fine when installed on 11.0, 11.1 etc etc.
The trick is to do the build linking on the oldest machine, you can use distcc(1) & cccache(1) to have a compile farm. There’s great instructions on setting that stuff up on Gentoo website.
If you worked in a more disciplined way, you would not have these niggles, it’d only be the changes other ppl make in the name of ‘progress’ that affect you. Having run Debian “stable” at times my self, avoiding changes does save time, but isn’t really much fun on desktop for long, because there’s always nice new things to try, and features, which do improve with time.
Why don’t you contribute (or look) for your non-included packages in Community website with OBS? May be they’d be useful to others to, and the community can divide and conquer the niggles.