User:Richard256

From openSUSE

Who are Users?

Opensuse is interesting almost like a social experiment perhaps. I could get drawn into the philosophy of it more than the technology of software. For example have recently read (MIT mathematician) Keith Devlin's book Goodbye Descartes [1] and could'nt put it down.

I would expect I am a "typical" user in sense of user of linux, but perhaps of type who are unlikely to get involved trying to contribute to opensuse as not really computer techy. Even so will put something here. Have a physics background, but at 68 no high level programming language skills, some assembler programs for microcontrollers etc.

Been dabbling with Linux a year or so now. Settled for Suse as used to it and now find other distros need getting used to, time which I am not ready to give.

Initially installed suse 9.0 on a Win 98 machine:- fitted a second hard drive and all installed well as a double boot machine. This allowed us (only my wife and I) to slowly learn Linux but quite quickly gave up the internet on Windows. Our Win 98 was getting in mess with Norton virus protection really complicating things and we were pretty fed up with it for the internet. Anyway, rarely use Win 98 now although still there.

Now have a second machine networked to first and 2Meg broadband. Pleased with Win 10.0 on first machine, but thought I'd put brandnew install of 10.1 on second. Seemed to have updated with the numerous patches available, but the new combined yast/zmd updating still had problems until end of July. Then found the SMART HowTO very well written and enabled me to obtain the recent yast and zmd etc update patches and now 10.1 seems fine, but a lot of time wasted getting there. Still only managed to install with Smart one patch at a time so used the updated Yast/zenupdater to complete all (a great number) of patches.

Later found [2] and see that perhaps I should have gone for Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 instead, but I assume that is much like my existing Suse 10.

My main contribution

May be able to contribute more in way of providing example of "typical user" (perhaps) requirements rather than technical contributions.

Big paradigm shift perhaps, but how about starting again with user/machine interface and rather that the "windows" GUI we find a way of command line perhaps with sophisticated autohelp, but I haven't thought this through, only a quick idea. This because the Linux command line and its shell languages are so good although designed for techy use.