> - have a great out of the box experience and the overall nicest
> initial OS experience I ever remember, but live every day with a
> package management system that isn’t up to what I experienced under
> Ubuntu.
due to the FREE nature of Linux, there is at least one other option
available to you:
have a great out of the box experience and the overall nicest
initial OS experience I ever remember, and using the open source from
Debian, develop/hack a clone of the entire Debian Package Management
system which looks/feels/act exactly like what i like BUT interacts
flawlessly with the openSUSE repos…and/or also can pull from
Debian/RH/Ubuntu etc etc etc…
btw: the “great out of the box experience” is nothing more than a not
so very important MARKETING gimmick dreamed up in Redmond USA because
they knew that very soon AFTER their sought after “great out of the
box experience” their customers were gonna have that “BSOD experience”
or “virus killed my machine experience” or “gotta reinstall again
experience” or “member of a botnet experience” or “i sent a virus to
all my friend experience” or “my keystrokes were stolen and my bank
account was hacked experience” or “all of my documents disappeared
experience” or “another $300 to ‘upgrade’ experience” or “what, the
new Word has a new incompatible with the old format? experience” or or
or or
Getting back to the thread subject, … that article is a poor example to quote. The date of it is January-2008. As any openSUSE user can tell you, an openSUSE effort to improve the package management starting in openSUSE-10.1 backfired, and it was an unmitigated disaster. There was even a second release of openSUSE-10.1 to address some of the problems, which is mostly not heard of in the openSUSE distribution. Since then, in every openSUSE release, starting with 10.2, there have been incremental improvements in the software package management.
But it does mean there are a lot of Linux users who do not use openSUSE, who still have a bad taste in their mouth about the openSUSE software package management fiasco of some years back, who have never spent to the time to check and bring them selves up to date on the current state of openSUSE, and who instead pontificate on out of date information, and write well worded articles that are full of inaccuracies.
Definitely a January 2008 article assessment, does not address the openSUSE software package management of today.
What would be more helpful, would be to state what one prefers in debian, and then compare that to what openSUSE’s zypper/yast software package management (together with easily installable package management tools for openSUSE such as “smart” (which I use with zypper/yast)), and then make a comparision.
Its possible many of the features you miss in debian are in yast/zypper/smart, and you simply were not aware of them. And its also possible there are some features that openSUSE has yet to adopt, but have been identified for future releases. And its also possible there are some features that openSUSE does not have, nor has any plans, but it should.
But unless specifics are mentioned, it is very difficult to address such a general post, other than to say that we disagree. Which leads to a “yes x is better”, “no y is better”, “no x is better” type thread, which helps no one and leads to flame wars.
I think all of us would rather move things forward technically, and propose things that could be improved in the openSUSE rpm based system.
MountainX, in case you were not aware of the URL, here is one giving some insight into zypper: Zypper/Usage/11.1 - openSUSE
and if you are curious about smart, which works well in conjunction with Zypper/YaST, here is a URL there: Package Management/Smart - openSUSE
… and finally, given the large amount of changes that have taken place in openSUSE software package management since January 2008, I urge you to make your assessments on something other than an article that is out of date (not to mention is subjective with no facts).
Let me first welcome you to openSUSE. I see your intro has been a bit rough. I’ll get to that in a bit. I hope you’ll be wise enough that similar personalities exist everywhere, not just here.
Now to the issue at hand. It seems you come from a debian/Ubunto background. That’s great. Now to switch over to an rpm distro and in particular openSUSE, you need to be patient with the changes.
As to the statement you made, you could have said it a lot better. I do understand package management. I was writing a book on one in particular and got to 65 pages. The package manager I was writing for was developed by the same people that developed apt and synaptic. The package manager I was writing for was smart package manager.
Now if you compared apt to zypper, your statement would be more accurate. But even then there are issues. Things you don’t understand. That’s ok. One of the big reasons for dependency issues on rpm distros is there are so many variations and subsequently each distro packages their own rpms and their own little scripts. Ubunto and mint and so on are all based on Debian, so it uses Debian packages and debian scripts. The dependency issue due to distros is eliminated on the Debian side.
To really understand though, you need to understand dselect and dpkg and apt for the debian side, and rpm for the rpm distros. Most experts tend to agree that zypper is much better than apt or yum. Zyppers main competition came from smart package manager. Zypper won that because smart package manager is in python. Break python and your package manager is broken as well.
You can read my book here Smart Package Manager I cover the history of rpm and deb and so much more.
Basically to change openSUSE to debian would be a major change. Scripts would change, and so would the package management.
I would like to comment further but I find myself unable
to focus on any one thing for arguments sake, my objections
are just so vast when it comes to GNOME/deb. So I’ll
just conclude with SuSE FTW!
First, I would like to thank oldcpu for this link. I had no idea of the power of zypper. I left openSUSE back during the package management fiasco and in that time I learned the debian package management system (apt/aptitude/synaptic). Now that I’ve returned to openSUSE, I see that zypper does indeed have the power of apt/aptitude.
@MountainX - having been on both sides, I see where you’re coming from, but it does work both ways (at least it did in my perspective). When I first left openSUSE and began learning Debian based distros, I very much preferred YaST and RPM. That’s kind of ironic considering that was the reason I left openSUSE to begin with. However, over a period of time I learned apt and synaptic and began to appreciate its power. Today I’m very comfortable with it. Now that I’ve returned to openSUSE, my initial thought was “if only openSUSE had the Debian package management system” (much like you). But as I hung around these forums and asked a few questions, I began to realize that zypper definitely has its merits too. As for dependency issues, I’ve run into just as many dependency circles in Debian as I did in RPM, so it’s not just an RPM thing. You might be interested to hear that zypper even has a dist-upgrade function just like apt and aptitude.
About the friendliness (or lack thereof) on forums, I’ve run into that on just about every forum I’ve visited. I belong to the forums of openSUSE, Debian, pcLinuxOS, and Mepis (to name a few), and every one of those has their share of bad apples, but overall the forums are very helpful and friendly. Debian forums have the reputation of being rude, but I was quite surprised that when you look past the few rude individuals, the rest of the community is pretty friendly. Give us a chance. I’m sure you’ll end up liking us after all.
Thanks everyone for the educational answers. These are the kind of responses I was hoping for.
It seems that I unintentionally pick the absolute worst titles for my posts. The more clever I think my title is, the worse job it does of conveying the point I hoped to convey.
My “unclever” titles are even worse!
I probably should have said something like “Convince me that package management in openSUSE can be as good as what I’m used to in Ubuntu.” Of course, that title would probably give the impression that I wasn’t reading or trying to learn anything on my own. So, even in hindsight, I have no skill at writing titles! lol!
I was certainly looking for a counter point to the articles I had been reading that said package management in openSUSE is poor. And that’s exactly what several kind folks did on page 3 of this thread. (Thanks pontke, Jonathan_R, oldcpu, smpoole7, and others.)
I have to say that I have more appreciation than ever for the importance of item #1 of those 5 points.
I remember something I learned a long time ago (and that I should practice more!). It goes like this: Say I am selling X and a guys comes in and says, “I like Y. X sucks.” An effective response is to say, “I know how you feel. I felt that way too. However, I found that blah blah blah…” And provide useful info. This is called feel-felt-found. It is simply a communication skill. This formula is not part of the Canonical code of conduct (afaik) but people do that all the time in the Ubuntu forums.
And as it turns out, that is exactly what pontke did in post 27, and it was highly effective. It was useful for me to read that perspective. It was educational. That’s the kind of response that wins supporters, IMO. So thanks for that.
I do believe the Ubuntu forums are better than many people recognize, although it is sometimes true that when the questions start getting more sophisticated, the quality of answers is sometimes subpar. But persistence usually results in a good answer eventually (and with the size of the community, eventually is often fairly quick). I have noticed problems with answers a more as I gained in knowledge over my two years of using Ubuntu. But I am also sure that I would not even be using any Linux distro now if not for the extremely helpful attitude on those forums. In my first days on Linux, any friendly attempt at help mattered more to me than whether or not that answer immediately solved my problem. An attempt at help allowed me to learn and move forward (even if in a zig zag).
In my mind, the Ubuntu code of conduct is the #1 reason Ubuntu has so much mind share now. (And thinking about this code reminds me that I am not proud of some of my earlier reactions in this thread to someone who was probably having a bad day.)
Does anyone care what I’ve been up to the last few days? I’m not sure if it matters really, but I’ll put it out there.
After page 1 of this thread, I (reluctantly) went looking for other distros. (That was not my intention when I made my initial post! And I wish I had received the posts on page 3 before I went looking.) But I found sidux and I’ve been playing around with it. I feel completely at home with the Debian package management and I really like having those vast repositories available. With sidux, I’m back to feeling like I have a moderate level of proficiency at using my computer for the things I need to get done.
However, not everything is all roses. For example, the sidux installer does not handle my needs for LVM inside encrypted partitions. Installing sidux with my partitioning requirements demands that I read some quite detailed instructions (sidux doesn’t use ubiquity or the Debian installer) and I found it difficult to even get the time to read through it due to my work schedule. So that was an immediate barrier. The installation was not trivial. Whereas with openSUSE, this complex partition setup was indeed trivial and it was done entirely in the installer. That’s just one example. I am still far from having the sweet setup I had so effortlessly with openSUSE.
My next step will be to read the material on zypper provided in the helpful posts above. I can’t say what my next move is. But I can say that it is obvious this community has some great members who are willing to help even when a guy like me writes a post that comes across poorly.
Not only do I see that the forums here are good quality, I already have a better understanding of package management in openSUSE just from the posts above. So, overall, my feeling is again in the positive direction. Thanks!
Ubuntu and Opensuse were distros, that I’ve been using most frequently. And always I ran into problems with Opensuse, but rarely with Ubuntu. Yes, I know, it is not Ubuntu good, it is Debian’s achievement. Ubuntu just doing things to work out of box without any strange things, that I sometimes met in Opensuse. In 11.1 I couldn’t burn even a CD - I wasn’t in right group, so I had to go to YAST and manage that. C’mon guys, CD-ROMs are in use quite a long time and this is dekstop oriented distro, unless it is orienting only into computers without CD-ROM drive. I had problems with gstreamer-plugins-bad: gstreamer crashes apps… - openSUSE Forums https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=519737
Also annoying. Like a week ago I heard in irc.freenode.net#suse , that gstreamer was updated, and this should be fixed some time ago.
I found also ugly bug with hal. Couldn’t mount digital camera. Like it was automounting, then autounmounting, or something like that. In #suse I was trying to find way out, but decision was, that it will be too hard for me, writing of scripts, also probably my knowledge of english is not sufficient enough (well, it is not my native language). So it probably required not desktop user, but programming user hands.
These are the bugs that I remember (there were more). I found YAST not very good while sorting dependencies, zypper probably better. Now I’m using Mandriva 2009.1. But waiting for 11.2 final, I hope I’ll use it, if it is free from annoying bugs I will not disagree with you, that technically Opensuse is good distro - probably it is, and probably you can prove that, but bugs, segfaults (maybe I’m unlucky). Well, maybe this try will be better.
Just my two cents.
Indeed openSUSE has its share of bugs. But in defence of openSUSE I have to note that we do encourage our users to raise bug reports in such cases. And often (not all the time, but often) we get the attention of the packagers and sometimes developers, in getting the bugs sorted.
For example wrt sound, Novell/SuSE-Gmbh packagers for sound are also alsa developers, and a bug report raised on openSUSE sound benefits all of Linux, and the fixes get sent upstream quickly. I can’t say the same for Ubuntu/Debian where often the fixes langish, and indeed sometimes never leave Ubuntu/Debian to go upstream. To me that is a betrayal of the Linux open source free software community goals and for that reason alone I will never use Ubuntu (until a proven effective change to that Ubuntu/Debian problem is in place). I’ve read talk on this but its simply not there yet, and I see the proof all the time in watching sound fixes for Ubuntu/Debian that do not make it upstream.
Indeed, I could go on and on and on about the litany of complaints from Ubuntu users about their sound, … and about other problems they have. I subscribe to the Dell Linux mailing list and the number of Ubuntu specific complaints there are significant. Far more than I ever remember encountering with my use of openSUSE Linux.
I guess I want to point out there are 2 sides to a coin. IMHO openSUSE is better than most distributions when it comes to fixing problems.
I believe this to be subjective. I believe its the SAME SOFTWARE for both that resolves the dependencies. Hence if it is the same software, there should be no differences.
There WILL be bugs in openSUSE-11.2 GM. IMHO if you wish to have the best openSUSE-11.2 GM experience, without waiting too long, then you should wait until Feb-2010 or March-2010 before you install it. Typically with EVERY distribution, and openSUSE is NO exception, in the first 2 to 3 months after a new release there are a mass of new bug reports, as the distribution is finally exposed to the “masses” and gaps in the testing become apparent.
What I do to ensure I am not disappointed by a major lapse in openSUSE functionality is TEST openSUSE alpha/beta (now milestone) releases against a list I have of functions/applications that are important to me (on a sandbox PC). And I ensure those function, and if they do not I write a bug report as soon as I can. And then I do a clean install on my PCs when I am ready for the new release after my successful testing.
I had Fedora (with Gnome) on my sandbox PC for almost a year. I installed Fedora about 3 months after its release data, to allow some time for bug fixes to be applied. In the end I removed Fedora because it was simply not up the user friendliness standard that I expect and I get from openSUSE (with KDE3). I also found the Fedora forums slower in helping than the openSUSE forum. I also tried Sidux (a debian install) just recently, and while I am a BIG Sidux fan, it lacks the ease and friendliness that I have learned to find and get from openSUSE.
But the bottom line is all of these are very subjective. Very very very subjective. You noted you use Mandriva. IMHO you should stick with Mandriva. Do NOT install openSUSE-11.2 when its first released, but rather wait some months for the bug fixes to come out (as I noted above). Else you risk making a judgement of openSUSE at an inappropriate snapshot timeframe.
And getting back to the subject of this Thread, I still believe it would helpful if users would list what they think is superior in Debian package management over the yast/zypper/smart/ because my recent Sidux (debian) experience left me with a strong preference for openSUSE’s yast/zypper/smart over Debian’s apt/synaptic.
MountainX, although I do think openSUSE’s package management system is one of the worst at first experience IMHO, it’s actually not that bad after you ticker around with it some, and I have to say the OP you posted looks quite silly and the article you quoted is just awful and outdated.
The big problem with openSUSE’s package management system is IMO the lack of a “Select best server”/rankmirror/yum-fastest-mirror functionality, and when the geographically closest server happens to be the slowest and lose connection a lot, the package download experience is simply not friendly to say the least. And another big problem with YaST/zypper is that they don’t have an “always retry” option so you can’t just set it to upgrade and leave it to itself if you don’t have a repo server with a reliable connection. When the above two problems combine, package upgrade in openSUSE can become quite hellish.
BUT, there’s a simple trick to solve the above problems, the answer is ARIA2!!! Just enable aria2 for ZYPP and it becomes maybe the fastest package management system out there, and all those annoying abort/retry/whatever prompts goes away!
I confess I’ve been spoiled living in Germany with a very high speed connection at home. The high speed is nice and there are many high speed servers in Germany and the country’s around Germany.
I see this was tested (successfully) on openSUSE-11.1 and it is in factory … I have not checked to see if this factory input made it into 11.2 milestones/RC1 . Does anyone know for certain ?
Am 20.10.2009 01:26, schrieb MountainX:
>
> Stupid me… I was thinking choice of distro should be made on the basis
> of the package management system, or KDE integration, or most up to date
> packages, or best hardware recognition…
>
> Now I realize that the experience I have had in the Ubuntu forums these
> last two years more than makes up for the deficiencies of Kubuntu. I can
> tweak Kubuntu to work the way I want it to. But I cannot so easily
> replace the culture they have created in their forums.
>
> BTW, I was not proposing some “‘idea’ (http://tinyurl.com/ykc5jwv)”.
> You really didn’t even understand my post. But that didn’t stop you from
> assuming and then spouting off on the basis of those incorrect
> assumptions.
>
> Just a few short minutes ago I was saying, “‘The more I use openSUSE
> 11.2, the more I love it’ (http://tinyurl.com/ykc5jwv).” Now I’m saying
> that the more I use these forums, the more I miss the Ubuntu experience.
> It took one thread to educate me about where my focus should be as a
> relative newcomer to Linux.
I totaly agree
If OpenSuse wants to be successfull on the Desktop the Community HAS
to go the Ubuntu way…otherwise it will stay on the servers and some
company desktops.
From the last post from Akoehl (currently)
“I marked your statement as pointless, one of the most pointless
statements I ever read and I explicitly showed you why repeatedly.
…If you really are into it, then start reading the help/man page of
zypper.”
He is right, but as a total newby you have no idea what a man page is.
And you are not going to read a whole book about Linux either.
And the help system could be much better by the way. I just tried it
out: I opened the Suse Help which brings me to a webpage (which is
actually nice). There is a link “offical Wiki” where you might think
thats the right way to go but this link only brings you to the “discover
it” home page. Another click on Wiki…still the same page. Ok, so I
tried the SDB…well pretty much outdated at least on a quick look.
There is a awesome forum for Ubuntu in Germany (ubuntuusers.de) which
has an great wiki, and still there are daily posts asking for something
which is actually covered in the Wiki.
I never read any comments like
“look in the wiki, idiot. or the man page”.
They give a nice hint to the wiki but add some comments to actual
problem right away.
I already know, that the same kind of people are here at these forums,
very helpfull and kind.
But sometimes…well you know. You dont remember the 99 taxidrivers that
just drove you home…you only remember the 1 that riped you off
Marco, you gave an excellent example of exactly what I have experienced on the Ubuntu forums in the US too! In fact, the way you have worded your comment really makes it clear to me what I was hoping to communicate – and did a poor job of explaining. (I’ll try to clarify by the end of this post - I hope.)
The rude answers are almost non-existent there (except maybe in the off-topic “Cafe” areas, but they are even rare there).
People new to Linux are often in a state of mind where a single harsh comment can chase them back to what they are familiar with (e.g., Windows).
Those of us who have gotten comfortable with Linux like to tell our friends. But when our friends who are trying Linux go to a forum and ask for help, if their experience is bad, they will tell (on average) 11 times as many people about their bad experience as we will tell about our positive experiences. (This is a general rule of thumb in marketing.) So, as an approximate rule, chasing one person off with a harsh comment cancels out the efforts of 11 others who are recommending Linux to friends.
In the big picture, I would like to see all Linux distros (and BSD too) gain the maximum market share they seek. (BTW, I know not all distros seek mass appeal.) Ultimately, I would like to see open source have the dominant market share.
Quite frankly, when I installed openSUSE 11.2 (even though it is pre-release) this was the very first time I ever felt like a Linux desktop distro had what it takes to appeal to any of my family or friends in a way that is equal to and superior to Windows. I am not a Windows fan at all, but after having installed several versions of Ubuntu, Linspire, PCLinuxOS and others for family and friends – and having to revert them to Windows at their request and over my objections, I started feeling like it would be many years before Linux was ready for the mainstream desktop. Suddenly, with openSUSE, I realized that day was practically here now! What a revelation! I cannot express how positive my experience with openSUSE was during the initial installation and first days of use.
Even though I now have a better understanding of the pros and cons of package management on openSUSE and Debian-based distros, from the perspective of a non-techie, from the perspective of Linux on the desktop of all my friends and family, the one weak link I see in openSUSE is package management. Sure, based on this post, I know I can get used to it and learn how to make it do what I want.
But Marco (in the post above) made me realize that my post wasn’t entirely about my needs. My post had some motivation from my feeling that this was finally the distro that I could recommend to everyone I know without hesitation – and then that feeling of delight was extinguished by the package management challenges – including little things like (if I understand correctly) the distro-dependent differences in RPMs.
So the disappointment that may have been underlying my post was not necessarily just for problems I ran into. It was for the whole general experience. (In the same way that there was not one simple thing that made openSUSE so much better than Ubuntu in the other ways that got me excited – it was the general experience of polish.)
So I finally realize why this thread may have been misunderstood. What I wanted to convey is that, “Hey, my experience with openSUSE was almost magical – it was that good! But package management broke that magical spell.”
Even if zypper turns out to be a tools I prefer over aptitude after I get familiar with it, that doesn’t address the issue my friends and family would face with openSUSE.
Even after reading this thread several times, I have some doubts that the solution just making openSUSE’s tools better. This stands out:
Maybe this has something to do with where my original headline came from. At some level, I do think openSUSE with the “more universal” (?) DEB format would be the magical combination that would “stick” when I install it for friends and family.
I cannot see my mother dealing with zypper or YaST. On the other hand, my experience is that they can handle the minimal required operations in Ubuntu (update manager, etc.) with no problem. And they can easily find/install DEBs (e.g., Hulu).
This is the essence of my thread: the general experience for the average non-techie user is marred by complexities related to package management, repositories and even minor distro-specific details of RPMs. And while I like using command line tools, my friends and family need something for package management that is ‘no brainer’ like on Ubuntu.
Earlier, I should not have just said, “it sucks.” I should have said the quality of openSUSE is so darn good that everyone I know should be running this OS – if the general package management experience was as easy for non-techies to use as the Ubuntu/DEBs are.
BTW, I’m not proposing – and never was proposing – that openSUSE change to Debian-based package management. It dawned on me that maybe some people think I was proposing that “idea”. I am not; and I realize it would be practically impossible to change openSUSE in that way. I am simply giving feedback about the general experiences and I’m using a comparision and contrast method to do so.
Am 22.10.2009 19:26, schrieb MountainX:
>
> BTW, I’m not proposing – and never was proposing – that openSUSE
> change to Debian-based package management. It dawned on me that maybe
> some people think I was proposing that “idea”. I am not; and I realize
> it would be practically impossible to change openSUSE in that way. I am
> simply giving feedback about the general experiences and I’m using a
> comparision and contrast method to do so.
>
Amen (even from a agnostic person)
Currently, my personal experience is leading me towards the following:
I am not sure if I will stay with OpenSuse for my daily life and work. I
like it, but currently there are some issues I have problems with (I
previously posted some Java issues). I think I will digg deeper in
OpenSuse and try to enhence it by submitting constructive bugreports and
see whats happening. For example, the only thing I am missing in zypper
right now is that I dont have autocompletition via the TAB key (or maybe
I just havent found it). But zypper is young and hopefully they will
adopt some best-practises from other tools (like aptitude).
Anyway. For my company, I am already convinced to use OpenSuse for all
the Servers. Yast is a great tool that takes a lot of burdon from you so
you dont have to mess around with a lot of config files (e.g. Firewall,
Domains, ISDN, … really great.)
I was tempted to write more…but I realized this would be even more
offtopic. Its about the community-idea and it was here at this forum
where I recently found a nice comment about a story about Everybody,
Somebody, and Nobody I will try to put something together…
IMHO there are 2 sides to that coin. My experience is the moderators on Ubuntu have a very heavy censorship hand. If there is even a hint of criticism they tend to delete posts. We try to be more liberal on openSUSE. We have to be “pushed” more by abusive users before we delete or edit a post, or before we ban a user. Other forums will do a ban or unapprove a post at the drop of a hat.
I recall an occasion, as a new user I made a post on a Toshiba forum, asking a question which was a bit tricky. One of the prolific posters gave me an off the cuff inaccurate answer. So I politely (politely mind you) replied, questioning if the answer was not something else. My post was IMMEDIATELY unapproved, and I received an email that my status as a forum member was changed to be on probation (or some term like that). Why ? Because I had a different technical view (which proved to be correct) of one of their more prolific posters. What does that tell you ? If you look their forum all is rosy and there is no descent. Why? Because they delete anything contrary to the common view of the admin/mods, and they do not take ANY criticism. None.
We try to be more open here. Which means those who come across with strong views and do not do their homework, can be in for a slightly rougher ride. Its a different culture than Toshiba. Its a different culture than Ubuntu. Frankly, I dislike the HEAVY censorship that goes on in the Ubuntu forum. But thats just me.
I will not disagree with you, that technically Opensuse is good distro - probably it is, and probably you can prove that, but bugs, segfaults (maybe I’m unlucky). Well, maybe this try will be better.