LinuXHaters

--dutch: Sorry lieve mensen ff een blogje in het engels--
In reference to some LinuxHaterBlogs here are my two cents:

LinuxHatersBlogs where written bij avid Linux users and contributers hoping to make a difference in user expierience by stating what hurdles they had to overcome getting to the system they wanted.
Ofcourse Linux is highly customisable and you can always "roll your own" if you do not like what you get.. But what about the not so savvy users.

I am using OpenSuse fo(u)r years now. I was surprised about the possibilities and the maturity of the Linux Desktop.. But lately i came across the downside of the distro.

I recently upgraded tot OpenSuse 11.2 on all my machines. A Asus EEEpc, two HP laptops and a homebrew laptop. here are some annoying problems i came across.

In the middle of the upgrade the networkconnection dropped / yast was unable to retrieve packages. One machine a had to resque with a dvd (which i did not wanted to download) On all following upgrades i pre-downloaded all needed RPMS. funny thing was i had to redo the entire dependancy-hell-firefighting-circus.

OpenSuse failed to parse the /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab entries correctly so i had to adit them by hand.

KDE chrashed on startup on two out of four machines. A rename of the .kde4 directory to .blahkde4 fixed the issue

My locale settings (and custom keybindings) where lost in above "fix".

Thunderbird updated to a Beta version, although the final release is out now i still cannot use my plugins (lightning, enigmail) and i NEED those plugins for work. O.K. maybe i had to wait before i upgraded .. But what the heck. it was a final release!
What would the O.S. community say if Windows or Apple came out with a broken release.

My Keepass config was gone. (a directory .keepassx was created with a fresh configfile.. so no history of where my keyfile and database resided).. A simple fix. but it would have been just as easy to check for an existing configfile in the firstplace!

Gwibber (a twitter client) just sits in my taskbar and whatever i try it does not pop up anymore. This is the least anoying bug..

In several earlier updates i have encountered different hardware detection problems.. From one .release to another my volume buttons failed to work.

Commenting about the problems in the OpenSuse fora was replied with emminent silence. A bugreport on another problem recieved a snarling comment.. and that was it.

On different distro's i work with (Red-Hat, Centos, Ubuntu, Gentoo) different problems arise but not too anoying (well, upgrading a gentoo box generally sucks).. Today a Centos Upgrade 350 packages with only one minor (?!) glitch..
I hope OpenSuse can catch op soon OR wil fork, just like the RedHat example) into three different distro's: Bleeding Edge (fedora-like) Commercial stable (Red-Hat) and Community-built-GNU (Centos).. If this was the case SuSe users could choose to install the stable version and not the experimental base for the later stable commercial edition.

But still.. Doupting to call my son-to-be Linus ;-)