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Thoughts on the direction of openSuSe

Dec 25, 2007  By kris
 in

Hello,
I was wondering what others thought of the direction of OpenSuSe? I believe it to be an awesome distribution but cannot stand the package management since they merged Red Carpet. It takes too long to even open the package manager since that happened. Anyone else have an opinion?

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Package Manager

richgroeneveld's picture
Submitted by richgroeneveld on Fri, 12/28/2007 - 14:51.

The 10.3 package manager is a huge improvement. I think the people at OpenSuse know they need to improve this and are working in that direction. Anyone know anything about the package manager in the pay version of SUSE. Isn't it the same?

YaST is very powerful

Rivenought's picture
Submitted by Rivenought (not verified) on Thu, 01/03/2008 - 12:09.

While YaST can certainly be somewhat slow, it is a very powerful and complicated application. I have noticed other distros having two or three applications doing what YaST does in one package. Granted, it could be faster. The version in 10.3 is much faster than it was in 10.2, so it is improving in speed.

A little more detail around my question :D

kris's picture
Submitted by kris on Fri, 01/04/2008 - 20:58.

I should mention I have been a loyal SuSe user since the 8.0. Yast is the main reason I went to the distro since I prefer a quick easy method of administration leaving more time for other things :D
Yes I agree that things seem to be improving however the time it takes to refresh package lists (on high bandwidth connections) is far from what it was prior to the merge of Red Carpet. Novell was chastised by several parties when this first happened and took the stance it was for the betterment of their product. In the last year I have started to dabble with Ubuntu and though there package management is not nearly as refined as Yast's it is considerably faster and utilizes much less processing. I for one would like to see SuSe decrease the time it takes to load, install and process the changes in their package manager in 1/10th the time it currently takes (with minimal extra repositories)

Overall I find SuSe to be one of the best Linux distros out there and put together in a logical and well defined way. Their file system layout is efficient and their stability is top notch.

I also use their "Pay" product and it is very much the same as far as package management is concerned. It does respond faster but I believe that is mainly due to a smaller number of packages overall included in that distribution.

Are there any other long term users that have noticed the same is the question I really meant to ask.