sontek ( John M. Anderson )

So I’ve become a huge fan of Linux Haters blog because he makes some very valid points about Linux and the open source community in general and it got me thinking of why I moved from Windows to Linux in the first place.

Picture this, you just bought built a brand new computer and want to install the brand spankin’ new Windows Vista Ultimate, you plop down $300, and away you go! What does $300 get you? A bare minimum operating system with nothing but MS Paint and Media Player.

So you spend the next 45 minutes installing your bare minimum operating system, it takes 45 minutes because the initial install is 15gb, so by bare minimum I mean feature set, not file size. So after you get installed you try to use the Internet and realize that it didn’t detect any of your hardware (video, audio, network), so you spend the next 2 hours spidering through multiple vendor’s websites who all have their downloads/driver section in different areas.

Now you have all your drivers downloaded, you go to install them to find out that the majority of the installers only extracted the files to your disk, they didn’t install them, the installer did not tell you they were only extracting, nor did they tell you where they were extracting them to. So after searching your disk and finding the extracted files you go into the folder to figure out what needs to be done to install them, but that is a waste of time since the vendor didn’t feel the need to write a README file. Being the genius that you are, you right click on My Computer -> Hardware -> Device Manager (because that was an intuitive place to look, thats the first place I thought of going to install drivers!) and now you are prompted with a dialog with a list of “Unkown Device” with little exclamation point next them. What to do? Easy! You right click on it, go to properties -> details and look at the very intuitive and easy to read string “PCI/VEN_1002&DEV_AA08&SUBSYS_AA081545&REV_00\4&1245FE7B&0&0108″ and go to http://pciids.sf.net and search for each device so you can figure out what driver to install for it.

After you have all your device drivers installed and can utilize all your hardware, you’ll want to go to Windows Update to make sure your computer is completely secure. You run the first batch of updates and it asks you to reboot, when it comes back up it doesn’t tell you all your updates weren’t finished, but using your spidey sense, you know that couldn’t have been all! So you go back to windows update to find a whole mess of updates waiting for you, these ones will also ask you to reboot (and so will the next 3 or 4 groups of updates). Rebooting is good for your new system, gets it warmed up.

4 reboots and 230 updates later you decide you would like to edit some family photos for your Christmas postcards–no problem-Vista comes with the all powerful MS Paint, which can do everything you’d ever want to do, just check out what this guy did with it: MS Paint Skills!.

Editing family photos was fun but now you would like to add everyones birthday to your calendar and setup some re-occurring tasks to remind you to take out the trash and pay bills on time, but you’ll soon have shut off notices and piled high garbage because there is no default calendaring program in Windows! But your boss will save the day, he just called and needs your latest TPS Report so you need go to open up your spreadsheet but you find out there is no spreadsheet program either, so you hike down to your local computer shop and plop down $300 for the office suite with the added benefit of having outlook (yay a Calendar for $300!!).

Spend the next 30 minutes to install Office (yes, office takes about as long to install as your whole operating system, but office is more powerful than your OS, so its O.K), after office is installed and you update your TPS report and send it to your boss you decide you’d like to create a vlog (Video Log) and post it on youtube, but as you’ll soon find out, Movie Maker isn’t going to be the easiest thing to locate.Bill Gates can’t even find it.

Six hundred dollars and 7 hours later you have an almost usable computer, you still can’t watch DIVX or DVDs, burn Audio CD’s, Balance your checkbook, Sync your phone to your calendar and e-mail, or entertain your children with any games but minesweeper or solitaire. You don’t even have a virus scan program yet!

I probably went around the block just to get next door, but my point is that after a simple 20 minute install of any popular Linux distribution I can do all of the things I’ve listed above. They come with the majority of hardware supported out of the box, an office suite (open office, abiword, gnumeric, evolution, etc), multiple graphic tools (gimp, inkscape), easy package manager that handles updates without multiple reboots (rpm, yum, yast, zypper, apt-get, package kit), video recording program (cheese), cd burner (Brasero, Wodim), lots of fun games, and the ability to balance your checkbook with GNU Cash.

In response to Herlo’s reviews of openSUSE here and here , I thought I’d give Fedora 8 a shot and give an openSUSE user’s perspective.

Lets start with the bad:
First, during the installation it detected my video resolution wrong (nvidia 6800gt) so I had to do my installation without being able to read most of the screen (didn’t see any easy way to switch to text mode, I was using PXE). I did not have this issue with Ubuntu or openSUSE 10.3 on the same computer but I tried a different computer with an Intel video card and couldn’t reproduce the error.

Second, for some reason the nspluginwrapper was installed by default and caused Firefox to be extremely unstable and crash on any website that had embedded audio or video, once I removed the package Firefox became much more stable. Having it installed by default really made no sense because the computer I was running was a 32-bit system and the point of nspluginwrapper is to allow PPC and AMD64 users to run 32-bit plug-ins.

Third, codecs (mp3, video) were not easily installable. I understand that Fedora can’t include these in the distribution but I would’ve loved an easy way to retrieve them. I had to add extra repositories manually (after googling and finding which ones I needed) and then install them. In openSUSE the community repositories are readily available in yast and all I have to do is enable them, there is also the 1-Click install so you do not have to locate/add any repositories. Codecbuddy is a noble attempt but I would like more options than Fluendo.

Fourth, Flash was not readily available (it comes by default in openSUSE 10.3) and I had to search around the Internet (again) for a repository that included it. Luckily Adobe does provide a Fedora specific repository but I think this repository should be included by default in Fedora (or easily enabled).

Fifth, By default Fedora has chosen the iwlwifi drives for my Intel wireless which is great because its a completely open source driver that does not require a service running. But there are some known bugs in this driver and required me to modify my home network so I could connect to it and I can’t connect to my work network at all. This decision would not bother me except that they do not provide the closed ipw3945 drivers in the repositories as an alternative (openSUSE 10.3 provides iwl as an alternative in the repos).

Sixth, I’ve eluded to this a few times already but openSUSE 10.3 provides many community repositories in yast ready to be enabled but it’s also easy to add and find new ones through webpin and the openSUSE build service and add them quickly through yast/zypper. With Fedora it is a little more complicated to locate and add repositories.

Seventh, Most of the system-config-* applications required a running X server, so I was not able to manage my computer remotely with the provided tools. (boot, date, network, packages, printer, selinux, services, time, and users). Not only did they not have a cli/ncurses based interface, some of them even crashed with python errors instead of letting me know I needed X or they gave me a notice that they are deprecated. Why would you want to enforce configuration tools to require X? These tools also did not provide a central “Dashboard” to use them, so a user has to “Just know” what tool to use for the job, they can’t just browse around an easy to use control panel.

Eighth, By default NetworkManager was not on, I can’t think of any reason not to enable NetworkManager by default on a desktop distribution, especially when a wireless network card is available.

Most of the issues aren’t that big of a problem to solve for relatively experienced Linux users but I think they would be show stoppers and scare regular users away from Linux, there are also some issues with Fedora that are more personal preference than bugs:

First, I think clearlooks is a much better theme than the default Fedora one.
Second, I prefer the SLAB menu from openSUSE. Novell did a lot of usability research that I don’t think should be overlooked and even if Fedora doesn’t want to provide it by default, it should at least be in the repositories or an option in the installation. I found it very difficult to find the things I needed, one example was I wanted to modify SELinux to be permissive instead of enforcing, so I went to System->Administration and it wasn’t there, I had to go Applications->System Tools->SELinux Management. What is the difference between Applications->System Tools and System->Administration and why doesn’t SELinux fit in the latter?

Now that we’ve hit the bad and ugly, lets end on a good note?

First, I really love yum over yast’s package management module/zypper. The console output is a lot more detailed and the GTK interface isn’t as invasive as yast’s (yast’s GTK interface takes focus as it runs updates, so its nearly impossible to use the computer while using it). Also, zypper/yast is unbearably slow, I turn auto-refresh off and only update when I know I have time to wait. Yum on the other hand is lightning fast and I wasn’t afraid to use it.

Second, Bluetooth support was enabled by default, although the default configuration didn’t allow me to connect to my phone, its nice to actually have devices detected and ready to be configured out of the box.

So, overall my personal preference is for openSUSE, I think the advantages out weigh the downfalls but at the same time I believe both distros could learn from each other.