GNOME/Projects/Lived in Project/Ubuntu

From openSUSE

Background

The purpose of this page is to keep track of the Lived-in Ubuntu experience.

Installation

User management

Ubuntu does a very useful use of sudo, by adding to the /etc/sudoers file the user you create during installation. This gives that user root access to all the system via the use of the sudo command. In fact, the root password is autogenerated during the installation, which means the user does not need to know that password.

While this is not a good idea for multi-user systems, it is very useful for desktop single-user installations.

Distribution upgrade

The updater application in Ubuntu provides a very convenient way to upgrade the distribution to the latest.

The updater detects when there is a new release of the distribution ready for downloading, and if so, enables a button that allows the user to start a distribution upgrade (via apt-get dist-upgrade). Once selected, the updater downloads a program to do the update, which in turn runs apt-get to actually perform the upgrade.

As the above screenshot shows, doing the upgrade is just a matter of performing a series of well known steps in order to prepare the system for the upgrade, that is:

• Modifying the software channels (zypper ar/rr ...)
• Fetching the upgrades (zypper refresh)
• Installing the upgrades (zypper upgrade)
• Cleaning up
• Restarting the system

Following these steps, we can write a similar tool that allows users to upgrade from one distro to the other, or to FACTORY at any time.

Noteworthy

Issues

Experience of switching to Factory from Ubuntu

27/02/2008

This is about Vincent Untz's experience. Some things are not related to Ubuntu, but some are. The items in the list are not things that should absolutely be implemented (well, some probably should ;-)) but things that are not good for me, coming with my Ubuntu background. I've not taken time to list the good things about openSUSE yet, but openSUSE does things in a better way too (the build service is simply fantastic, for example).

Note that some of the items here are simply caused by the fact that openSUSE tries to be everything at the same time (distro for server, desktop, etc.). It might make sense to have an install CD for server, and another one for desktop.

Also, there's something wrong with factory if we want people to use it (especially developers -- upstream developers, or openSUSE developers). Ubuntu is doing a better job here.

• the installer is way too complex, with too many things to do, even with the current simplification work going on in Factory (which is a good start). I'll file bugs or start discussion on the yast mailing list.
• sudo should be used by default for a desktop install. It doesn't make any sense to have the root account for people with no unix background. There's an option "Use the same password for root as the one used for the user" in the installer, but it's not about sudo, I believe.
• in openSUSE, there are two radeon drivers: the old one and the randr1.2-enabled one (new one), probably because the new one is still in beta. Still, it doesn't make much sense to have both and the new one works fine. Only this one should be used.
• on startup, there's a 10 seconds delay in grub. Ubuntu only uses 1 or 2 seconds. It helps with the feeling of booting faster.
• Ubuntu seems to boot faster. There might be less services, some services are started after GDM is shown, etc. upstart might help too. Again, this is just a feeling.
• Ubuntu uses brown as the color for the root window when starting GDM (it's a gdm config option, I believe). It helps with the transition from the brown gdm theme to the brown default background on the user desktop. In openSUSE, we still use the greyish blue. It should be some green.
• the menu bar is completely unusable in openSUSE: icons are too big (distro patch), and there are tons of submenus (because we use the same menu config as KDE?)
• with only a very short look, I saw many not-updated-to-the-latest-versions packages: yelp, totem, epiphany, rhythmbox for example. Some are a bit old, and some are really really old (yelp was still 2.18).
• Ubuntu is quite good at uploading new packages as soon as upstream releases (at least, for GNOME). This is really great for a developer like me.
• when I update openSUSE with "zypper dup", I have to download nearly 1GB of packages. I seriously doubt that all of them were updated (they were rebuilt because a dependency was changed, but that's all). It takes me hours to get all updates... (slow DSL line). It's certainly possible to do better. Debian, for example, doesn't rebuild everything when a dependency changes and it works well.
• the 2-days delay in factory is just horrible for a developer wanting the latest packages. In Ubuntu, there was only something like 1 hour or 2 hours.
• the Ubuntu development version is nearly never broken. Factory is always broken in some way (still usable, but either no network, or uninstallable updates, or impossible to mount a usb key, etc.).
• I had to manually install the firmware for my intel wireless card
• when I don't have a gstreamer plugin, totem shows a dialog proposing me to install it. It just opens a webpage. Ubuntu actually installs the right package (and adds the repository if needed)
• I couldn't find the useful gstreamer plugins for factory... So no multimedia experience for me.
• it's actually confusing to have so many repositories on software.opensuse.org. If possible, everything should go to the main factory repository. The additional repositories are still nice to let users provide other packages, or to provide experimental packages (and for backporting to old versions of opensuse).
• there are tons of installed packages by default that don't make any sense. Some graphical ones (gftp? skencil?), some non-graphical (tcsh, ksh, zsh: do we really need all shells by default?)
• Ubuntu doesn't use a firewall by default because the default services are secure and trusted (ssh, avahi, eg). With openSUSE, I have to choose what I want to do with the firewall. I tend to prefer the Ubuntu way. I'd be fine with a firewall by default if it was properly configured by default.
• too many unneeded yast stuff. Users don't need to know about apparmor. A tool to config the mouse model in X shouldn't be needed. There are 8 launchers in the Software category and I don't understand what they are... etc.
• seahorse/gnome-keyring integration: in Ubuntu, when I ssh somewhere, a dialog pops up. In openSUSE, I need to use the standard ssh-agent, it seems.
• in the middle of the afternoon, I see beagle-build-index and the man db rebuild happening. Lots of hard disk use. Middle of the afternoon is when I use my computer. It should be done during the night if possible, or when the computer isn't used (screensaver running, eg)

07/05/2008

And here's my feeling after a few more weeks with Factory. A summary is that things have either improved, or I got used to them -- but it's all pretty good. We've fixed some issues I mentioned earlier, that were either bugs, or old packages. Good stuff happening. Also, the timing to start using openSUSE was not the best from a stability point of view -- things are much better now and it's solid.

Here are some more details:

• installer is much improved, thanks to the automatic configuration. There are still a few details that could be improved, but they're only minor details.
• on the su vs sudo topic: I do still think that going the sudo way would make things better for the desktop (especially since, by default, the root & first user passwords are the same). But clearly, that's a hot topic where there's no real consensus.
• not quite sure what happened with the radeon drivers -- I've changed laptop since then. It seems we still ship both, though.
• I still think we could reduce the grub timeout, especially if there's no other OS installed.
• openSUSE seems to boot much faster now. Not quite sure why, but that's pretty good :-)
• I'm still not used to downloading 1GB of updates. deltarpm would help, but I believe there's nearly no mirror for this. That's an important thing to consider if we want to get more and more users testing factory.
• on the other hand, I've become a big fan of the complete rebuild for all packages.
• we could probably have a helper program that helps the user install the firmware for wireless cards (ie, "this is not free software, are you sure?" and enable the non-free repository)
• packman works for openSUSE 11.0, so we have gstreamer codecs now. It probably makes sense to improve the codec buddy stuff (when you're missing a codec, you're redirected to a webpage; we should probably offer to enable the packman repository and install the right packages)
• the build service is really great. I love it. The only downside is that you have so many repositories. Blue-sky idea: maybe we could automatically promote some packages from selected repositories to a "opensuse extra" repository, so users would mainly use two repositories (the main one and the extra one).
• we can probably work a bit more on the GNOME & non-GNOME patterns to remove some packages from the default GNOME install (from live-cd, since it might not be possible on the dvd)
• I think we could have less yast stuff for a default desktop install