OpenSUSE 12.3 Being Prepped With Numerous Changes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenSUSE 12.3 Being Prepped With Numerous Changes

The first developmental milestone release of the forthcoming openSUSE 12.3 was made publicly available today...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTIyNDM

[cjcox]

One think I like about SUSE/OpenSUSE is that you could tell they knew how to write scripts. There just seemed to be a lot more *ix experience with them. With these new changes, they'll be as broken as the "other" distro. So what's their edge??

Oh well... maybe that was the "other" distro's plans all along (talking about how to kill off OpenSUSE).

Sad day...

[Ericg]

To me, openSUSE always felt kind of out-of-place to begin with.

Debian/Ubuntu handles Deb-Apt
Gentoo handles source-minimalism
Arch handles binary-minimalism
Fedora handles rpm-yum (now rpm-dnf)
openSUSE handles rpm-yum...again?

They ship "new stable" software so its not a Stability vs Newer issue like Debian vs Ubuntu. They make all the same choices that Fedora makes so its not "do their own thing" reason. KDE and Gnome integrate together a lot more nicely nowadays so "Pure QT!" systems arent as big of a deal. Its been a long time since I heard about SUSE Enterprise in any meaningful way so you cant even really say that "Well its the testbed for Suse" like you can for Fedora and RHEL. openSUSE to me always seemed like a distro without a purpose other than "Just because we CAN exist, we WILL exist"

[bwat47]

To me, openSUSE always felt kind of out-of-place to begin with.

Debian/Ubuntu handles Deb-Apt
Gentoo handles source-minimalism
Arch handles binary-minimalism
Fedora handles rpm-yum (now rpm-dnf)
openSUSE handles rpm-yum...again?

They ship "new stable" software so its not a Stability vs Newer issue like Debian vs Ubuntu. They make all the same choices that Fedora makes so its not "do their own thing" reason. KDE and Gnome integrate together a lot more nicely nowadays so "Pure QT!" systems arent as big of a deal. Its been a long time since I heard about SUSE Enterprise in any meaningful way so you cant even really say that "Well its the testbed for Suse" like you can for Fedora and RHEL. openSUSE to me always seemed like a distro without a purpose other than "Just because we CAN exist, we WILL exist"

Opensuse doesn't use yum, and the fact that they use RPM doesn't make them the same as fedora. Also there's nothing "Pure QT" about opensuse, they offer both KDE and Gnome desktops.

[chris2kari]

With every iteration of OpenSUSE the developers are stripping out unique powerful features that made Suse what it was and replacing them with generic Fedora/RH tech.

http://news.opensuse.org/2012/11/08/...ready-for-you/
The idiots want to abandon Zypper/Yast in favor of the excreble packagekit.
They've almost completed gutting the init system to blindly follow Redhat of the cliff with Systemd etc etc.

For god's sakes, If I wanted green Fedora then I would install fedora & download a green theme..

For me it's the last decent independent user friendly distro left.
When it becomes fully absorbed into the borg of Linux I have no answer left but go back to Mac etc.

A damn shame but what can you do?

[deanjo]

The idiots want to abandon Zypper/Yast in favor of the excreble packagekit.

I don't see anything about "abandon Zypper/Yast", I see refactoring of zypper to add capabilities (something that has been done a few times already). Packagekit is just another front end to package management (which was the whole idea behind packagekit)

http://www.packagekit.org/pk-intro.html

The actual nuts-and-bolts distro tool (yum, apt, conary, etc) is used by PackageKit using compiled and scripted helpers. PackageKit isn't meant to replace these tools, instead providing a common set of abstractions that can be used by standard GUI and text mode package managers.

They've almost completed gutting the init system to blindly follow Redhat of the cliff with Systemd etc etc.

This was again done to address a few issues. The init system is fine but does carry a lot of legacy payload. With most other distro's switching to Systemd this is actually a good thing as it becomes less distro dependent. One of the things that every one gripes about is linux's "fragmentation", this is just one way of minimizing the "fragmentation" impact. Plus SystemD does have it's advantages.
Not to mention that it was one of the more requested items put forth by the opensuse community.

For god's sakes, If I wanted green Fedora then I would install fedora & download a green theme..

Redhat/Fedora have also followed SuSE leads in the past as well in areas such as the use of ALSA over OSS.

For me it's the last decent independent user friendly distro left.
When it becomes fully absorbed into the borg of Linux I have no answer left but go back to Mac etc.

A damn shame but what can you do?

SuSE also adopted RPM as their package type. That was brought out by Redhat as well but it still didn't mean that openSUSE was a spinoff of Redhat. Just that SuSE decided to use a good package system instead of relying on the same package system of it's parent distro Slackware.

openSUSE is still a top contributor to many of the projects that it utilizes and is no stranger to adopting others innovations and incorporating it into their distro. That is one of the advantages of opensource operating systems. openSUSE still refines the desktop experience like no other and I personally have not seen another distro with the refinement of their desktops for example. I would only start to worry about openSUSE loosing it's identity and becoming a Fedora clones if they started adapting the likes of Anaconda (still hate that forever buggy thing).

[GreatEmerald]

Indeed, to me it sounds that they are working on improving zypper, not replacing it. That might end up making Apper something better than an annoyance and ZMD-alike.

And they still have all the unique features that really matter. YaST, SUSE Studio, the wealth of packages from OBS. And its releases are "new stable" as opposed to "rather unstable" of Fedora, so the niche is fairly well-defined.

[chris2kari]

I don't see anything about "abandon Zypper/Yast", I see refactoring of zypper to add capabilities (something that has been done a few times already). Packagekit is just another front end to package management (which was the whole idea behind packagekit)

Packagekit is rubbish.
It has Gnome disease - ie everything is COMPLETELY hidden from the end user & it is full of bugs.
Do a fresh install of OpenSUSE 12.2 & then try to add/remove some software & what do you get? Packagekit has locked it..
Look on the bug trackers & mailings lists. The dev's repsonses to complaints about this is "oh we know about that.. it happens for some hours or so.."
When pressed to fix the problem the response is "no, someone asked us to put that in so we are not taking it out"

The only way to gain control of your system is to :

1) open a terminal, kill packagekit,
2) disable it from restarting,
3) rebooting then
4) rooting it out with zypper rm packagekit apper.
5) Congratulate yourself on making OpenSUSE now usable.

If you don't beleive me look at the huge number of threads on the forums, the bug trackers and the mailing lists!
Ok moderator go stick your head back in the Fedora kool-aide.

[bwat47]

I've never had any major issues with packagekit

[jumperdono]

Final failure, useless junk, missed deadline.