Sigh - openSUSE is too good!

English Open Chat
1

Hi,

I started using Linux about 16 years ago when it was very young. Desktop environments were few, and ugly, and applications were limited. Linux was nerdy and you knew that Windows users would leave your machine well alone. Nowadays Linux, and openSUSE in particular, is so polished that everything has changed.

My wife teaches and uses Microsoft applications at work. She does a lot of lesson preparation at home and when I bought her last PC I neglected to budget for Microsoft Office Professional so she had to suffer OpenOffice.org-2.x. Boy did I get some grief over that. Quotes like “This doesn’t work like Word!” or “How do I do this, or that, in Writer!”. For months life was hell for me with her continual complaints (no praise for OpenOffice.org not Blue-screening like Word did regulary though).

Somewhere along the way our son appeared and from age 3 he started playing with the mouse and exploring kiddies websites on whatever PC happened to be accessible. Some Windows-only content was denied to him on my Linux system but most of what he liked was Flash-based and he was relatively content and entertained. My wife was, by now, comfortable with OpenOffice.org but still using Windows and had moved on to creating presentations with Impress without any help from me.

A few months back I switched from Mandriva to openSUSE on my 5 year old Athlon XP and Eee computers. It was life as normal with a minimal amount of adjustment to the new OS but I planned on building a new, 64-bit multi-core, system to coincide with the release of openSUSE-11.4. It transpired that the machine was complete around the release of 11.4-RC1 so I installed it as a means of testing the hardware and avoiding the need to upgrade from 11.3 to 11.4 later. Needless to say, testing the machine meant that I often left it powered-on with my account logged-in so I could watch for freezes and other time-related misbehaviour.

I was beginning to realise that openSUSE-11.4 was shaping-up to be a good release so I started populating the desktop with icons for my frequently-used applications (being careful to stick with the regular openSUSE and Packman repositories only at this stage) and what did I find? Every time my back was turned, my Windows-bound wife or son are there on my computer doing something or other. There are no complaints about LibreOffice or Firefox-4, which neither of them had been exposed to prior to me building this system. They are opening documents from the web and printing them without any need of assistance from me. I have no idea what my inkjet cartridge consumption will be now.

So there you are openSUSE. Because of you and your gleaming green polish I have had precious little opportunity to actually use this new machine myself. I suppose the one good thing is that there might be a chance for me to install openSUSE on my wife’s PC should she become really comfortable with it. I do sometimes wonder if moving to openSUSE was the right thing to do from a nerdy perspective… oh well, such is life!

Regards,
Neil Darlow

2

Thanks for that inspiring tale. Hope you have luck regaining access to your computer.

3

nice job Neil!!
is writing your job, or just a well honed hobby…

hopefully someone here who is also on the mail lists will make
reference to this thread, so the devs have the chance to feel proud!

–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.0.11, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11

4

Short and sweet from me.

11.4 is inspired, beautiful and the best yet.

5

Not really. It was mostly a consequence of my mother insisting I use proper spoken and written English. Work-wise, I am an Electronics Design Engineer part of which requires writing of reports, specifications and end-user documentation.

Regards,
Neil Darlow

6

Neil thats an interesting story.

I have my 84 year old mother (she turns 85 in about 2 weeks) on openSUSE-11.3 Linux, … it took a while for her to migrate.

In her case it was her starting with computers for the first time (at the age of 75) with winME back in 2001, but what pushed her to Linux was her Windows PC would invariably become infected with virus, and no one the family was capable of giving her the support she needed. My mother lives in a different continent from myself (she lives in Canada, I live in Europe). Every year during my once/year visit, my wife and I would re-install her winME and fix her PC.

Sometime around 2004 or 2005 or so (maybe 2003 … I can’t recall) during my once/year visit, I installed openSUSE in a dual boot on her PC with winME. She did not use it for 6-months or so, until her winME stopped working (due to virus/trojans), when she then switched to using openSUSE until I arrived for my annual visit, and my wife cleaned up and fixed her winME. So her computer useage between operating systems was then about 30-70 Linux-Windows. I was able to maintain her Linux remotely from Europe, so there was never a problem with Linux running.

Around that time (at the urging of other family members who liked to visit her place and user her PC) we also installed winXP, so her PC had a tri-boot: (1) winME (2) winXP and (3) Linux. She preferred winME (which she learned about computers on) and she actually preferred Linux over winXP. But again, after about 6-months, when winME stopped working, she ended up using winXP about 50% and Linux about 50% of the time. Then after another 4-months or so, winXP stopped working, so it was Linux full time.

During our annual visit, my wife and I discovered it was too difficult to reinstall winME, as it was too out of date to put any firewall/anti-virus on (and no more security fixes), but my wife did restore my mother’s non-functional winXP to a functional status. So her PC remainded a dual boot for winXP and Linux. My mother became more familiar with winXP and she ended up using winXP a bit more than she used Linux (mainly because of Microsoft Power Point’s ability to play audio with slide presentations - which Linux handles poorly).

And after about 6-months, her winXP would fail, and it would be 100% Linux until our annual visit.

Last year we replaced her old 2001 computer with a new PC and that PC came with windows7. However I ran into a hardware problem that windows7 required one BIOS setting and Linux required a different BIOS setting, so I had to make a choice - Linux or Windows7 ? So I disabled the windows7 and put only openSUSE-11.3 Linux as her only boot choice. We did put winXP in Virtual Box as an option (with an icon on her openSUSE Linux desktop to launch winXP), for when she wanted to use Windows (in order to play Microsoft Power Point presentations with audio).

She now runs openSUSE Linux 80% of the time, and MS-Windows (in Virtual Box) around 20% of the time.

If Open Office or Office Libre could ever figure out how to provide reliable audio with Microsoft Office prepared audio/slide presentations, I suspect my mother would stop using MS-Windows.

But its interesting to see her use openSUSE Linux with no complaints at the age of almost 85. Of course my giving her remote support constantly (a continent away using ssh, vnc and nx) is a big factor in her being ok with using Linux.

7

I enjoyed your story, and 11.4 does seem to be the most attractive openSUSE I have seen throughout the 10.x and 11.x series so far. :slight_smile: