Yast also pollutes your desktop when it does its updating in the background: if you have multiple desktops then a window will popup and close every 2 seconds during the update process, as opposed to a progress pane inside Yast window. This too should be fixed.

The fact that Zenworks is no longer included, however, is a big plus. Zenworks and zypper would periodically (once every 24 hours) spike up CPU utilization to 100% for almost an hour on a top-of-the-line processor. It also had a bug that made Yast impossible to close after installing software without forcefully killing Zen.

If Smart was more user-friendly, I'd switch from YaST to Smart. The slow package manager is one of the reasons I almost switched away from SuSE. However it does have significant bonuses, such as being able to run semi-graphically in command-line mode, which has saved me on numerous occasions.

I think openSUSE is missing the point on many front:

- The current state of openSUSE, with the terribly slow package manager, the need to manually remove ZMD, the lack of centralized and easy to add repositories to activate multimedia support and other stuff, added to the slow processes in solving issues don't make openSUSE actually ready for non-technical users, or at least for users without a certain experience with Linux.

- The documentation on the wiki is difficult to find, and often too technical to be accessible. I mean: there are too little how-to's and too much development stuff. openSUSE is evidently a lab to develop the enterprise line of SUSE Linux, at least at the moment.

- The communication inside Novell and between Novell/openSUSE and the community is terrible. Novell guys give different answers to the same question, and there's almost no involvement of the community in the decision process.
The status meetings, which should be the place for this kind of communication, is just a place where things are presented and always the same topics are discussed (OBS, wiki status, mainly, which I find of no interest for most of the users). The most frequent answer during the question time is "please post the question on the mailing list". Not exactly a good tecnique.

- The community on its side is almost non-existent. There's a small group of users who accept the status-quo, and don't want things to change. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, just visit the IRC support channel #irc # freenode.
A community to be effective needs to grow, to involve new people. But to do this, it is necessary to help them at first even with "idiot" issues. The newbies are what will become the users and community members tomorrow, and it's definetly pointless to give answers like (from #suse) "leave them to ubuntu". With this approach ubuntu grow, and we don't.

Regards,
A.

It just has not the long life usually required by enterprises, otherwise it is absolutely fine.

Ciao, Marcus (working for Novell and openSUSE

So what's your differentiation with Fedora?

Let me remind your positioning when OpenSUSE was launched.

http://en.opensuse.org/FAQ:FAQ

"The openSUSE project explicitly looks beyond the technical community to the broader non-technical community of computer users interested in Linux."

Was that a lie? How about being mature and just accepting openly that you screwed up the packaging management with multiple competing efforts and now willing to clean it all up.

We are currently designing SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, which is targeted to provide “interface-compatible” utilities to rug

I take that to mean that you're dropping Zenworks, in the form it is right now, in SLE 11 as well.