I love Yast. It’s a major reason I use openSUSE. It is so handy to have a central place to handle system configuration. It’s awesome.
However, I think that it needs some improvements. Yast has not really gained much new functionality in the past couple releases (at least, nothing I’ve noticed). It’s gotten better at somethings, and much of what wasn’t changed has been reorganized; so it’s definitely been worked on, but it hasn’t learned many new tricks. I have a couple of suggestions for places where Yast could improve.
- Auto-detection of printers. Yast’s Printer module is a powerful tool for printer configuration, but as far as I can tell, it only auto-detects local printers. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with this, most OS’s don’t auto-detect remote printers. However, the gnome-printer tool in both Ubuntu and openSUSE 11.1 successfully auto-detect both my Samba printer and my Wireless Deskjet printer. They just show up in the panel, ready to configure. I could set up both of these manually with Yast easily, but only because I am somewhat experienced and know exactly what I’m doing. Yast does not auto-detect them, and none of the scanning options turn up anything.
To do one farther, I think Yast should not only detect these printers, but also prompt the user when they are detected, and offer to configure them (like Yast currently does with local printers). Since the open-source technology is already available for auto-detecting remote printers (GNOME has it), would this be a difficult addition? Surely prompting on discovering a remote printer would not be a tremendous feat.
I really think this kind of functionality belongs in Yast, not in one desktop environment’s tool.
- Ndiswrapper configuration. Sure, there are other tools that will do this, but shouldn’t this be integrated into Yast’s network module? I don’t see any reason why not, Mepis Linux does exactly that (integrates Ndis* configuration within it’s network config tool)
My development skills are in a completely different field so I cannot say for certain what effort is required for this to happen, however the capability is obviously already there, so why shouldn’t it be included in Yast?
What do you guys think? Is it about time Yast flexed it’s muscles a bit?