“As you know OpenSUSE released the first beta in the 10.2 dev cycle on the 26th and Tuxmachines has been checking it out in preparation for our report. This feature and version freeze release came with quite a few annoying bugs, but most didn’t apply to my testing. I did encounter a coupla problems of my own and little or no new eye candy was found. But how did the system perform overall?”
Just to be clear; we all know that isn’t a word right? Right? Oh my goodness.
Yeah, yeah, but we all got it so why care? ;D
The PPC bug seems to have been fixed and Beta 1 ISO images have been uploaded.
http://en.opensuse.org/Development_Version#Downloads
Edited 2006-10-29 18:45
No new eye-candy!? This is an outrage!!
When the glitches in this beta are fixed this will be a great Linux distro.
I hope the menu systems, both the KDE version and the Gnome version spreads to other Linuxes. Especially the new KDE menu is a big improvement over the old standard K-menu that had far to meny items and submenus, not to mention the buttonlike ugly delimiters between different part of the menu.
Linux can now offer a very usable desktop environment that rivals that of its commersial competitors. The Linux desktop is evolving very fast, and my guess is that Microsoft and others will have a very hard time to keep up.
My Fedora Core 6 desktop can allready do most of the things the more advanced versions of vista will do, and it certainly can do more than Vista Basic, and other low end Vistas. This new Suse distro will most likely be even better once it is released.
The only thing, that holds people back now is the lack of applications. Yes, there are a lot of Linux apps, and many of them are very good, but I’m talking about applications that people are used to from using them on other platforms. It doesn’t matter that gimp is a very good program, when people allready have spent years learning Photoshop.
The only way to get a graphics artist to switch would be if gimp was, not just better, but significantly better than Photoshop. Unfortunately this is not the case, yet. And no, he will probably not run Photoshop on wine either, as it is an unsupported platform and Adobe will not support him if something goes wrong.
So whats needed is that more commersial apps ported to Linux. It will be very interesting to see how commersial software houses will react once the Linux desktop is more usable than its commersial competitors.
This is bound to happen very soon, this suse beta is just one example on how consistent, usable and good looking Linux can be.
Actually, why choose between Windows and Linux, when you can run many well known Windows apps in Linux. Wine has made it pretty easy for me to run Photoshop, Explorer, Dreamweaver, Flash, Office 2003, Utorrent and many other great Windows apps natively in Linux. Most distro’s bundle a version of wine that is easily installible. After that’s done, it’s fairly easy to get those apps running. Now it’s not grandmother easy, but in truth, most grandmother don’t get programs running in Windows either (that’s what us wonderful grandkids are for), so that really shouldn’t be an expectation. I’d love to have Linux ports of those applications, but I’m a more pratical Linux user. In truth, i want the apps any way I can get them and if that ship doesn’t come to us, we’ve got to swim out to it or work diligently on apps like the Gimp so that they make Photoshop irrelevent. If there was dedicated development from some company and the community behind the Gimp, Photoshop would die on the vine, becuase not much beats free.
I’d say SUSE is just as friendly as Windows when you using YaST for system configuration.
Whats even better than Gimp is a proprietary program called Pixel. It offers or will offer the features in Photoshop for a tiny fraction of the cost and is fully cross-platform.
And of course you can run the latest Photoshop versions on Linux with Wine or Crossover.
> Digicam 0.9
> Gimp 2.4
> K3B 1.0
> Amarok 1.4.4
they were all scheduled for inclusion, now they have mysteriously disappeared…………..
Yay, they’ve got the new K menu and it looks great! Hopefully it’s as usable as it is good-looking. Yast2 has also been made to look good in KDE again, and KDE on the whole looks very nice (take a look at My Computer, for instance–quite nice). Also pleased to see the new SLED-style Gnome menu in action.
On the more critical side, though, I hope they change the default Kicker style. The bland grey style looks drab in comparison to the serene creamy off-white Gnome bar default. If they really want to distinguish the KDE from the Gnome, they should make it a bit shiny or something. Right now it just looks dull.
In the Gnome desktop screenshots, meanwhile, I noted that the KDE/Qt apps don’t match the Gnome/Gtk apps’ color schemes. (Qt has light grey while Gtk has the nice creamy off-white). Much better would be if they could render Qt apps with the same beautiful off-white-color as the GTK apps.
Hopefully they can fix up these visual nits, since I’ve always considered visual beauty and consistency to be one of Suse’s strong poitns. Of course I know and believe that stability and usability is much more important than minor UI tweaks. Still, I feel like they’re already so close to visual perfection with this release that they might as well go for the full deal…
The heading of my last post was meant to be “Some visual critiques.” I originally had “Argh, KDE looks ugly” when I was just going to comment on the kicker, but then I looked at more stuff and changed my mind. So ignore that heading, please.
…(might be nice if we could change the Subject line when editing comments, too)…
Edited 2006-10-30 18:59