On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 8:47 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
> On 24 March 2015 at 18:06, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> I fully realise that this is a SL list (along with the occasional mention
>> of RHEL, CentOS, etc.).  I currently am using X86-64 SL 7 on my workstation.
>> Our primary research compute engine is using X86-64 SL 6 with MPI and Nvidia
>> CUDA.  A colleague here refuses to allow the migration from SL 6 to SL 7
>> despite my success in migrating my workstation (with Mate as I personally
>> dislike both Gnome 3 and KDE Plasma having now had to use both).  Because my
>> laptop is over 5 years old, I acquired a new HP ZBook 15 mobile workstation,
>> provisioned to support a 64 bit X86-64 OS.  I was planning to install SL 7,
>> but now need to decide between that and OpenSUSE 13.2 or possibly, if can we
>> afford the licensing fee, SLES 12 or SLED 12.  I have looked at the OpenSUSE
>> listserve more or less equivalent to this one, and find fewer professional
>> threads and discussions, although it does seem considerably better than what
>> I recall a student showed me from Ubuntu (Debian derivative).  I am not
>> asking for any postings back to this list; however, is there anyone with SL
>> experience who also has OpenSUSE or SLES experience?  Advice would be most
>> appreciated.  I am going to be installing OpenSUSE 13.2 on the new laptop,
>> but backing off to SL 7 if it proves unsatisfactory.  I particularly am
>> interested in OpenSUSE in production university or research entity
>> environments -- not enthusiast home use to replace, say, MS Windows or even
>> Mac OS X.
>>
>> Yasha Karant
>
>
> In many cases OpenSUSE is going to be a lot like Fedora or non LTS Ubuntu.
> It has shorter support times in comparison to SLED but gets updates to
> various core materials much sooner. It uses RPM technology but was for the
> longest time was more like slackware in how things were packaged up and laid
> out on disks.

Except when it's not. YaST, the configuration tool, is wheat you get
when the same sort of people who write systemd try to write
configuration tools. It does one heck of a lot, and none of it
completely correctly.

The SRPM's are also, frankly, nasty. Rather than providing a list of
patches or source files, they bundle them into tarballs *inside* the
SRPM, and pick and chose among the contents of the tarball with
various scripting. The results are only manageable if you have the
actual source the tarballs are built from, and discourage local
package tuning, patching, or even comprehension.

> Usage of OpenSUSE in univerisity and research environments occurs mainly in
> Europe with various places in the US using it (though the US universities
> tend towards Debian.) YAST can be a wonder but it was getting a rewrite and
> people who liked it in the past have been grumpy lately. However that is
> most likely a temporary problem.

I've used it in the past, and recently. It's much like the new
anaconda. It has "paradigms" rather than checklists and traceable
workflow, and it violates every single one of Eric Raymond's
guidelines for open source GUI's from his "Luxury of Ignorance" essay.
It also violates every single one of the guidelines I sent Eric and he
added to the essay as a postscript.

    http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html

The essay, and the postscript, is more than 10 yeas old. The more
things change, the more they stay the same....

> --
> Stephen J Smoogen.
>