Questions and Ideas regarding ubuntu and other distributions.

[Erik Bågfors]

Hi all

I send this to the devel list because it's more about development of
ubuntu than about
usage of it. And also, I'm not yet a ubuntu-user.

I'm a long time debian user who now and then gets tired of debians
long time before releases and the fact that you have to tweek
everything manually.

I've been running debian almost exclusivly for 8 years but have
experimented alittle with RedHat (which I can't stand for some
reason), Mandrake (which had lot's of the "just works" magic right)
and now lately SuSE.

The main downside with SuSE is not very good support for gnome and old
software (I'm still running gnome 2.4. How hip is that today when 2.8
is out ? :) ) and I also always find that rpm-based distributions
get's messed up after a while.

SuSE really has some nice things that I would love to see in debian or
a debian based distribution.

The most important one is the "just works"-factor.  When running
debian there is usually lot's of magic getting ever piece of hardware
working.  I'm tired of this.  With SuSE it was all done for me.  I
haven't had to do ANYTHING.  I expect that debian will get closer and
closer to this but what's

The second thing that I found incredable good is scpm.  The System
Configuration Profile Management.  I'll send a separate mail about
that because it's really nice.

The third thing is YaST. The SuSE configuration program.  In this you
can set up everything from one single location. Something like this
has really been missing bigtime in debian.  What's ubuntu's plans for
this?  I know you are planing to use the gnome system tools and that's
all fine but there are still lot's of things that you have to set in
other locations in debian.  Just look at the number of debconf stuff
you can find, quite alot of stuff you have to edit manually and so on.
 This really has to be moved into a single base.  Any plans?

SaX2, the X11 configuration GUI.  Adding a second monitor was very
very simple.  I didn't once have to edit the /etc/X11/XF86Config file.

I could add more things to this list but these are the most important things.

Regards,
Erik