Distro Inspirations

From openSUSE

AJ send the following to his teams:

openSUSE 10.3 is a really great release and I'd like to thank you for your participation on it. To take a break and some inspiration I'd like you to take some time now (let's say two days) and look at other current distributions and operating systems and check what they can do better, or how could we improve our products.

Looking at operating systems, I consider the following most interesting but feel free to look at others as well:

• Fedora 8
• Ubuntu/Kubuntu 7.10
• Mandriva 2008
• PCLinuxOS
• Windows Vista
• Mac OS X
• Sabayon

I suggest to install at least one of these products on real hardware and evaluate the distribution and try to get ideas for our next product.

• Look at the installation, what do you like and hate?
• Check the area you're most familiar in, e.g. printing, and see how it's integrated, e.g. configure a printer and print some documents. What is different compared to openSUSE 10.3? Where is the user experience different?
• Use the machine for some work, play around with it. How do you like it?

Please write down your experience on the openSUSE wiki at http://en.opensuse.org/Distro_Inspirations - and if you see things that you like to discuss, discuss them on the opensuse-factory mailing list.

Try to evaluate the distribution from a desktop user perspective - and if you want to evaluate it differentely, please state it.

Here are the comments from this evaluation. Please sign your comments!

Ubuntu/Debian

• Nightly live-CD builds. Ubuntu has this, and it's a really nice way for developers and users to test for specific bugs, or to get a feel for how the unstable work is progressing. I'm sure they get a lot more feedback during the development cycle this way. Hpjansson openSUSE has this now too
• Bash completion on available targets in aptitude and apt-* (command-not-found); this includes the command (e.g. update, install, dist-upgrade, etc) as well as package names following the command. JosefAssad, mvyskocil Ported during hack week.
• Ubuntu has a dedicated server CD. Think it would be nice for openSUSE to have aswell. Especially after dropping the 5-cd set. Many new users, especially the technical ones, get into GNU/Linux from the server side. A dedicated openSUSE server CD could kill in the home and small office market. Martin Schlander
• Demo files on Live-CD. Beineri
• Simplified desktop application installer. Beineri (implementation started as ITO project)
• Restricted Driver Manager - detects and easy install a support for supported hardware, but with no freely distribute drivers (eg. nVidia/ATI cards, Broadcom Wifi firmware, ...). Beineri, mvyskocil
• Well working distro upgrade/distro upgrade tool for previous version. Beineri
• AIGLX by default, where possible. Makes launching Compiz a lot less painful in many scenarios. --apokryphos 09:27, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
• Nice log-out KDE screen effect :) --apokryphos 09:27, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
• In amarok when mp3 files get played back a popup occures that asks if the user wants to install mp3 support. If the user answers yes the package manager installs the libxine-ffmpeg package Faust3
• Totem asks if it should search for suitable codecs when a restricted format is detected. The packages can then be installed from a community repository. Faust3
• Rythmbox does not play mp3 files Faust3
• Installation is fast because of less packages that the user probably doesn't need (e.g. no xterm). Tgoettlicher
• Installation asks only questions an inexperienced user can easily answer. Tgoettlicher
• Configuration Menu is concise because "enhanced" services (e.g. yp) are missing. Configuring them is hard. Tgoettlicher
• Nice installation from LiveCD, which is offered on the first place to download. You can do everything what you want in your Live session during installation.pgajdos You're not aware of our openSUSE 10.3 Live-CDs, or? Beineri
• Migrating configuration files to new system from different users found in different systems during installation process (but it didn't work for me for some reason). pgajdos (Pavol is working on it)
• No problem with Gnome multiscreen on my Aspire 3610 with default setup. pgajdos
• Simple menu scheme {Applications, Places, System} I like much more than that one used in openSUSE. pgajdos
• Special desktop versions (Xubuntu, fluxbuntu) with lower memory requirements results in ability to use older hardware (800MHz w/ 128MB RAM) or having a faster system. Petr Cerny
• Debian asks during install if it may send statistics back to the project which packages are installed. As long as only standard patterns are used this is not too interesting, but when users fine-tune their systems, it is. In the case of openSUSE, we could find out that way which build service projects are used most and could/should be integrated into the main distribution. Also, finding out which packages from the default install are regularly deleted by users could improve our patterns. krauseha

PCLinuxOS

• installs amarok, kaffeine and MPlayer with all codecs (ffmpeg,libmad,...) Faust3

Mandriva

• Official USB Live images (Mandriva Flash) Beineri
• Cheaper DVD case-only retail version available Beineri
• More expensive retail product with DVD player, Cedega, whole Fluendo codes (Mandriva Powerpack) Beineri
• Contains ffmpeg and libmad for mp3 and windows media playback out of the box Faust3
• Windows documents and settings migration tool (based on Ubuntu's tool) Beineri
• Allows network installation over Wireless, DVB, ISDN, GPRS, Bluetooth, ... (Bug #293609) Beineri
• Beautiful control panel's icons (compare those to Yast in 10.3....) Maciej Pilichowski

Fedora

• Fedora has a gui for enabling desktop effects. I believe Ubuntu stole it, so they have it too. openSUSE (with KDE) doesn't have such a thing. Of course with KDE4 kwin_composite will be configurable with KDE System Settings, but I suspect that until kwin_composite matures many users will keep wanting Compiz (Fusion) on KDE. Martin Schlander
• Fedora (8) uses a free driver for Atheros (think it's called ath5k). Whereas we don't have support for it out of the box. Martin Schlander
• Fedora reduces the download of package metadata by storing it in a compressed sqlite database on the mirrors. Martin Schlander
• Fedora firewall interface properly configures samba ports for network access and browsing shares (highports issue). Alberto Passalacqua
• Fedora has a network applet which allows multiple network profiles Alberto Passalacqua
• You can do 'yum install libpq.so.5' to install postgresql-libs, or 'yum install obsolete-package' to install the package providing/obsoleting the old package. It would be nice to have that in zypper as well. Update: It's there in zypper, but you have to say 'zypper install --capability'. I filed Bug #337007 to make it default. Michal Marek
• The time zone setup during install (or system-config-time in running system) has a nice zoomable world map ( screenshot). The zoom is a bit jerky, but otherwise it looks good. Update: openSUSE 11.0 has something similar now. Michal Marek
• During network install (didn't try other methods), when asked to set a hostname, the hostname already retrieved via dhcp is offered and "set hostname via dhcp" is set by default. Michal Marek
• The "License Information" screen has only about ten lines, stating in cleartext that the individual packages have their own licenses and that the compilation of them is GPL2 licensed. Michal Marek
• Respins which include released online updates. Beineri
• Fedora asks for root's password when a user clicks on a NTFS partition icon, and then mounts it. AlbertoP
• Fedora allows the user to change performance settings using the "Frequency scaling applet" in GNOME. AlbertoP
• Fedora does version upgrades via online update for certain applications (eg Gimp 2.4.1 for Fedora 8, OOo 2.3 for Fedora 7) Beineri

Gentoo

• Gentoo has a very powerful conf-update: Each configuration file is backed up in an intact state. Before package update, package manager does diff between intact and active file and tries to apply it to the new config file. Only if patch fails, user has to take action. Another very interesting feature is discriminating between packages explicitly required by user and package introduced as dependencies and possibility to wipe unused dependencies out. Stanislav Brabec

Sabayon

• drivers in the distro DVD
• excellent theme
• works out-the-box attitude

Slackware

• no -dev(el) packages - header files are included with binaries. While this can be considered waste of space for "normal" users, more advanced users don't have to install them separately (this is traditionally problem of Ubuntu where 'make menuconfig' in kernel tree crashes on missing dependencies). Feature in package manager to automatically select matching -devel packages without having to issue any additional commands would be nice (this is already implemented to some extent in YaST). Petr Cerny

OpenEmbedded / Ångström

OpenEmbedded is an universal build system for many embedded distributions, including Ångström. It uses BitBake build tool for building packages and resolving dependencies. It uses several staging directories to easily support build for more platforms allowing to share binaries as much as possible: host (e. g. x86_64), architecture independent, target platform (e. g. ARMv5 TE), target device (e. g. Zaurus SL-C3xxx). The whole system is inspired by Debian, build system is partially inspired by Gentoo. Stanislav Brabec

Ångström is a minimalistic distribution intended for small form factor machines (PDA, mobile phones). Basic image uses GPE environment (GTK+ based) and can run without any problems on machines with 64MiB RAM. It has surprisingly fast package manager, which includes repository management. Stanislav Brabec

Mac OS X

• Time Machine --Beineri; something like this exists but requires filesystem support (see ext3cow) and userland support see tools and a timemachine-type interface in progress). Josef Assad
• Mac OS network troubleshooting. If network is not accessible, main browsers (say, konqueror) should show a page with troubleshooting options. Moreover it's possible to implement a step-by-step network configuration wizard (sorry, no reference found) -- Nikolay Derkach
• After a network outage, applications are notified on reconnection: Mail automatically client reconnects and checks for new mail; Browser reloads a page which wasn't reachable before. Which is convenient. Peter Poeml
• the ways of installing new software, system of keyboard shortcuts, really simple System Preferences panel... and many more details. Anicka
• Apple provides and supports the core the system -- there are no bunch of games, text editors, mp3 players, you name it -- suse should also focus on operating system itself and provide at last quality OS, not constant "under construction" thousands of software packages (in other words: focus on kernel, ONE desktop/window manager, printing, networking, and nothing more) Maciej Pilichowski
• Mac OS comes with a set of powerful applications for everyday creative purposes: photo editing and publishing, movie editing, music (software synthesizer, harddisk recording studio), which all work together nicely. Peter Poeml
• Can publish videos at YouTube with 1 click from within movie application (iMovie). My current favourite :-) Peter Poeml
• Every commandline tool has a man page. (This is not relevant to desktop users, obviously.) Peter Poeml
• Apple has an "incremental" upgrade strategy. Every few months, the regular Software Update installs new releases (even major versions) of included system components and applications. This means that a (for instance) two-year old system doesn't become more and more outdated (and boring) over time. On the contrary, the system is enriched by nice new features every now and then. This also means that a system which I installed two years ago behaves and feels exactly the same as a machine I installed one year or one month ago. ...Of course, there also are entire system upgrades, every few years, which bring about larger changes which can't be applied incrementally, or comprise a new product. Peter Poeml

Windows Vista

• Directory structure in home directory, created by default: Documents, Pictures, Downloads, ... etc. The names are localized. These directories can be easily picked up in file dialog. The best-fitting directory is usually offered by default. --Nadvornik We have xdg-user-dirs package, but not as default --Beineri
• The configuration options are better understandable by non-technical people and more task oriented: "Connection to Internet" vs. "Network Device" in YaST. --Nadvornik
• What I like of Windows is that everything is treated as a folder, the menu is simple to personalize and to play it, which give certain flexibility. --Dahool