Alessandro17 Posted March 16, 2008 Share Posted March 16, 2008 It’s difficult to come by hard numbers when you’re talking about Linux installations — particularly when you’re talking about community distros like openSUSE where anyone can download and install openSUSE and distribute install media to friends, family, etc. Counting downloads doesn’t quite cut it because some people download openSUSE (or any other distro) and never install it. Some people might download it and install it on their computer, their friend’s computers, 100 computers at a school, and so on. We track people who opt-in to be counted after the install — so we probably miss some, but at least we rule out false positives as much as possible that way. Community Participation Let’s look at a few other numbers. * 34,517 packages live in the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) — which is up 2.7% from last month. * 4,570 users registered with OBS — up 14.3% from last month. * 34,860 users are subscribed to openSUSE mailing lists — up 1.6% from January. * We had 10,840,400 page views last month for opensuse.org. That’s up from 10,492,357 in January, and 9,376,785 in December. I think the Build Service is showing nice, steady growth. Overall, we have a lot of steady growth for openSUSE — but, of course, we always have room for more. If you’re running an older version of openSUSE, I’d definitely encourage you to install 10.3. If you have friends and family that haven’t tried openSUSE yet, now’s a good time to get them on board. :-) Overall, pretty impressive figures. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~pcwiz Posted March 16, 2008 Share Posted March 16, 2008 Incredible! And also...sorry I can't resist...MORE OPENSUSE NEWS FROM ALESSANDRO But to be honest, before I came to this forum, I didn't even know openSUSE existed. I knew about SuSE but not "openSUSE" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alessandro17 Posted March 16, 2008 Author Share Posted March 16, 2008 I knew about SuSE but not "openSUSE" Well, that is because they wanted to make it clear that the community project was different from Novell commercial offerings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~pcwiz Posted March 17, 2008 Share Posted March 17, 2008 P.S. This should probably be in Reader News, doesn't catch much attention down here Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alessandro17 Posted March 17, 2008 Author Share Posted March 17, 2008 P.S. This should probably be in Reader News, doesn't catch much attention down here Yes I know, but I don't want to annoy people with news which maybe isn't of interest to all/most. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Forceman Posted March 18, 2008 Share Posted March 18, 2008 Dont like SUSE anymore rpms are just not good enough and the install process is long and boring. I think Ubuntu will have more success on the desktop and YaST to complex now, Ubuntu keeps it simple. I think the other distro are somewhat wondering why Ubuntu is so popular, I just thing they simplifed the tools and intergraded it better, APT is so much more streamlined right from the CLI to UI. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alessandro17 Posted March 18, 2008 Author Share Posted March 18, 2008 Dont like SUSE anymore rpms are just not good enough and the install process is long and boring. I think Ubuntu will have more success on the desktop and YaST to complex now, Ubuntu keeps it simple. Of course I disagree, and I could bring dozens of reasons why. But I don't want to start yet another Ubuntu vs. openSUSE "war", we have had too many. I'll tell you one thing, though. When friends and relatives ask for my help with their computers, I'll assess their needs, without involving my personal tastes. I'll even advise them to use Windows where appropriate. But, having tried every single Ubuntu release, beginning from the first betas, years ago, I don't put it in anybody's computer, I feel I'd do them a disservice. If I feel that openSUSE is not appropriate for them, I'll consider other user-friendly distros, like for instance Mandriva. That happens only in case of hardware incompatibilty, though. OpenSUSE is absolutely ideal for a new user. Once installed it won't break, and all the end user has to do is to agree to automated updates. Their KDE is extremely polished, with very intuitive menus (I have just compared it to the Debian menu which is a bit of a mess). When my sister came to see me, years ago, she learned how to use SUSE KDE in a matter of minutes, and she told me how surprised she was. There is an incredible wealth of quality applications... Also, there is no need to reinstall or upgrade at every new release, because almost everything which really matters is updated regularly. This is very important for "Joe User", who is accustomed to keeping the same OS for years. I don't know why I should give people anything else, and certainly not because somebody says that the *buntus are hippie and sexy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Forceman Posted March 18, 2008 Share Posted March 18, 2008 SUSE has always been pro KDE, they gave GNOME more love in 10.3 and GTK YaST is pretty good. I just think they are pushing mono more then it's worth, most of the defaults are mono apps and it's set out more as a corporate desktop thana users desktop IMHO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alessandro17 Posted March 18, 2008 Author Share Posted March 18, 2008 I just think they are pushing mono more then it's worth, most of the defaults are mono apps That is possibly true, but it doesn't really bother me. and it's set out more as a corporate desktop thana users desktop IMHO. I have tried every version of SLED and some version of SLES. It seems to me that they are totally different animals than openSUSE, which seems to me very user friendly and oriented. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Forceman Posted March 18, 2008 Share Posted March 18, 2008 I tried SLED during Beta and final and OpenSUSE is pretty much the same as it, SLAB menu, Beagle, Tomboy and just about the same layout. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alessandro17 Posted March 19, 2008 Author Share Posted March 19, 2008 SLED and openSUSE may appear similar at first sight, but "under the hood", they are very different. The main difference is packages availability. OpenSUSE has tons more, packages which are not related to enterprise productivity. A distribution which has never been desktop oriented is clearly Fedora. It is a testbed for RHEL: no NVIDIA or ATI drivers out of the box or easy to install, no automounted Windows partitions, no proprietary plugins (Flash, Acrobat Reader, Real Player, Java), not many desktop applications, Yum is incredibly slow... I don't mean that Fedora is a bad distro, I only mean that it needs quite some work and patience in order to use it as a desktop OS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Forceman Posted March 20, 2008 Share Posted March 20, 2008 Thats why I said APT is best for desktop, YaST is slower installing software compared to Synaptic and Yum is even worse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alessandro17 Posted March 20, 2008 Author Share Posted March 20, 2008 Thats why I said APT is best for desktop, YaST is slower installing software compared to Synaptic and Yum is even worse. But, again, there are several package managers for openSUSE. Smart is the most used, but you can also use APT (YES, APT and synaptic!), Yum (not that many people like that)... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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