I like OpenSuse, it is a great distro. My first experience with Suse was back in the 7.0 days, and I’ve enjoyed using it since then, off and on, until 10.3 at which point it became my preferred desktop distro, and 11.x has been really great. Of course, as with all other distros, there have been many changes and improvements over the years with repositories, and Suse has of course made progress here. (Remember how slow zypper used to be? Good grief.)
But oh - how painful it can still be to do even the most basic of things.
Despite the fancy OpenSuse Build Service, and hundreds of private and community repos, it honestly seems that Suse still lags behind other popular distros.
Take this specific example: I want to install the OTR plugin for Kopete. One would expect this to be about as easy as possible, and that it would be in OSS. Nope . . .
Okay - let’s check webpin and search for kopete-otr for 11.3 . . . nope. No luck. Okay fine, let’s just grab the one for 11.2 and call it good - webpin returns lots of results for those from the KDE Community repos like: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/Community/openSUSE_11.2
Oh - wait, those are all broken, as there is no community repo for KDE anymore in: Index of /repositories/KDE:/KDE4:
Awesome. Okay, let’s search for it at https://build.opensuse.org/ and no less than three projects are found. Two of them with failed builds, no builds, etc. One with builds for 11.1
Unfortunately I didn’t see the build that succeeded at first, so I just google kopete-otr rpm pbone and grabbed the rpm and I’m good.
Now, is there a point to all this rambling? Well, I have to ask myself why, despite all the “improvements”, it is still often easier to find RPMs from sources like pbone then all the build service, community repos, webpin, etc. solutions that very often simple don’t work. Not to mention the frequent regularity with which packages for say 11.1 or 11.2 never emerge for 11.3. Compare this to, let’s say Ubuntu, where most of this is not the norm, wherein you enable universe and multiverse and apt-get install kopete-otr and you are done. I’m not saying Ubuntu a better, I don’t think that, but from a user experience perspective, when it comes to installing common packages, it certainly is better.
However, I like OpenSuse better and prefer to use it as my primary desktop OS. But I have to say, with constant trouble as with the simple example above, I often find myself asking why as a distro these types of issues can’t be improved.
Sure, I love the IDEA of the Build Service, and have (on a few occasions) used it, but honestly not that much. The idea of cross distro packaging is nice, but frankly I’d first rather just have common packages that used to be in 11.1 and 11.2 and have insanely common things like kopete-otr actually be available.
I’m wondering how others may feel on this point. Do other OpenSuse users get as frustrated with these type of deficiencies? Am I in some kind of fringe group of bad luck users who just happen to regularly encounter this with the packages I need? Or is this something that is an actual issue with merit that should be improved?
I’d like to hear what other may have to say on this and perhaps give this some additional perspective.
Cheers,
Lews Therin
