Fwd: a long-time Suser compares kubuntu and Suse

[stephan beal]

Hello, Ubuntu documentors...

Below is a long-winded mail i just posted on the suse-linux-e maling 
list. i thought some of you might find it interesting because a 
significant amount of it is praising the Kubuntu documentation.

Take care, and thanks for the wonderful documentation!

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: a long-time Suser compares kubuntu and Suse
Date: Monday 21 August 2006 02:41
From: stephan beal <stephan at s11n.net>
To: suse-linux-e at suse.com

Hiya!

Warning: this mail is long-winded. If you're not up to reading a very
long post, then don't bother - delete it now.

------------------------------------------------
A bit of background:

One of the things i've always loved about Suse, and boasted about to
anyone who's asked me why i use it, is that i can pop in the
installation DVD and be back online and working again within an hour or
so. Back in the old days, when i used to love to spend 2 days
configuring my box after each new installation, that wasn't a concern.
But as i've matured [i.e., grown old] and Linux has become my primary
OS, both at work and at home, getting and staying online and functional
has become my priority. Suse has always been good at that. Turn it on
and it just works [the vast majority of the time].

i switched from Slackware to Suse in the summer of 1998 (6.0, i think)
and i've used only Suse since then. i've experimented with other
distros, but never for more than a couple days before switching back to
Suse. Debian, for example, is simply a pain in the butt to get working
for desktop use. RedHat has, and always will, suck. ArkLinux is nice
and ultra-optimized for speed but is missing a large package repository
(maybe not true, but it's missing XEmacs packages, and that's my
primary programming tool). Ubuntu is colorful and nice looking, but
based on Gnome, which i hate with a deep-seated passion. So i decided
to give Kubuntu a try. For those who don't know, Kubuntu is basically
Ubuntu with a default desktop of KDE instead of Gnome.

Over the years i've contributed, on and off, to the Suse newsgroups and
lists such as this one. In fact, i'll also claim that the hostname that
you see in the yast titlebar ("Yast @ myhost") is my feature. It was
added to yast a couple weeks after a sent a bug report to Suse asking
them to add it because i had accidentally installed software on the
wrong machine when i had yast open on two remote boxes at once and got
the windows mixed up. (Before the hostname was there, it was easy to
confuse multiple yast instances running on different machines.)

i tell you this not to brag, but to put my long history with Suse into
perspective, so as to proactively dispel any ideas that i'm unfairly
criticising Suse here.

------------------------------------------------
Now, what this mail is all about:

After some Grief with the Suse 10.1 packaging tools, i bit the bullet
and installed Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org) on my laptop.

Here i'd like to give a quick overview of what i now feel Suse is doing
right and where it could improve, compared specifically with Kubuntu.
In the past i was unable to make such a comparison because i was so
caught up in my Suse-blindness. Suse's good, but my recent frustration
with it led me astray, and this is the result...

[Had i never upgraded from 10.0 to 10.1, i almost certainly would not
 be writing this...]

------------------------------------------------
What Suse does RIGHT:

- Administration of network services, e.g. Samba, DNS, etc, is
incredibly well done in Suse. It's soooo simple to set this stuff up in
Yast. (And to THINK, i used to LOVE editing those config files by
hand!)

- The modularity of Yast makes it easy for Suse to add news tools to
 the tried and true Yast interface, both in curses mode and X11 mode.
 This makes new features easy to find, compared to a hodge-podge of
 various tools scattered around the system.

- Setting up network devices is trivial with yast. i'd have never
figured out how to get my DSL connection working if not for yast.

- The SuseFirewall. Simplicity and effectiveness at its best. Were it
not for the SuseFirewall, i would probably disconnect my DSL line
between each click i make in my browser, simply out of paranoia.

- The installation process is pretty damned good. Kubuntu's X11-based
installer crashed near the end, leaving my system unbootable. The
text-based installer was much closer to what i am used to with Yast, in
terms of features, though yast does provide the user with many more
options (e.g. selecting your screen resolution for X11, whereas Kubuntu
simply selects the highest resolution your chipset can support).


------------------------------------------------
What Suse could DO BETTER:

- SIMPLE documentation. IMO, Wikis are HORRIBLE means of documentation
except in some unusual circumstances (and i can't think of a good use
case for a wiki, to be honest). They are, almost without exception,
butt-ugly, hard to weed through, and are notorious for having out of
date or duplicated entries (each of various quality). By comparison,
Kubuntu's online manual is a dream come true:
http://doc.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/desktopguide/C/index.html

Using it, within *literally* minutes i figured out how to effectively
use one of the package managers (Adept, a Qt front end for apt) and
install my XVid/mp3/multimedia stuff. With Suse you've got to search
for ages, then go find the software, install it, and hope it works. The
typical case is: a) figure out that it doesn't work, b) google a bit,
c) go ask on a mailing list (like this one), d) get a terse answer with
the word "packman" in it, e) go add the sources to yast, f) install,
waiting on yast to try to figure out if it can use the remote install
source, g) try again. Ad nauseum.

<short aside>
A recent post to this list claimed that Yast downloaded the 17MB remote
package list *3 times* in the *same session*. On a 6+MBit DSL line that
might be acceptable (depends on whether the package server can keep up
with your line - not all of them can provide more than 100k/second),
but over a modem it's downright unacceptable.
</short aside>

And what do you know - i haven't had to subscribe to a Kubuntu mailing
list to figure anything out (nor have i had to google a single time).

The kubuntu manual is simple, straightforward, and gives me the *exact*
commands/packages i need to install to solve my problems (e.g., the
much-maligned multimedia packages). It's as simple as "apt-get
install ..." Granted, a fast DSL line still helps, but even without one
the process is faster than with Suse because the apt tools don't have
the high logistical overhead which Yast software management tools do.
That leads us to...

- Yast's software management is simple to use and effective but
*incredibly* slow compared to apt-based tools. Orders of magnitude
slower. The most annoying thing is that after any given install, Yast
has to run the SuseConfig.* scripts, updating every single setting for
every single app/service on my system, including those which have
*absolutely nothing* to do with what i just installed. e.g. if i
install a game, the Latex and Apache SuseConfig scripts are run.
WTF?!?!?! With Adept (or other apt-based tools), it's trivial to search
for new packages and installing them is FAST. There are no absurd wait
times or "this repo is not signed. Do you want to continue?" warnings
on every frigging install. (And that misleading "do not show this
warning again" checkbox which doesn't really do what nearly everyone
thinks it should.)
Today i had to find out the hard way which development tools i needed
 to install on Kubuntu. This is a process consisting of:
a) Try to configure/build one of my source trees.
b) See what breaks (i.e., what tool/library is missing).
c) Install the missing package.
d) Lather, rinse, repeat. [For the non-Americans in the crowd, that
means "start from the beginning," or "go back to step (a)".]
In yast this is downright tedious to do because the install process
takes so damned long. With apt/Adept it was almost a pleasure, with
almost no wait time involved. Searching is simple and installation is
lightening-fast.

Now i've known about apt for years, and have used it in small amounts
before, but i always found it tedious because it was missing a front
end. With Kubuntu's clear, straightforward documentation, i was led
directly to Adept and was downloading updates from faraway servers in a
matter of under three minutes. And the Adept UI is a dream to use
compared to Yast's software manager (which isn't bad in and of itself,
but could learn some ease-of-use tricks from Adept).


------------------------------------------------
And finally... my [very personal] conclusion:

i'm convinced. After 8 full years of being a die-hard Suse user, my
laptop is going to stick with Kubuntu. My desktop PC will stay Suse, if
ONLY because i've used Yast to set up the PC as my primary DSL
connection and a router/firewall for the two laptops. If that was as
easy to do in Kubuntu as it is in Suse, i'd have reinstalled my desktop
machine today. i'm *that* convinced that Kubuntu is what i'm looking
for in a desktop OS. For a server, i'd almost certainly stick with Yast
because administering the network services is so simple to do. (And all
these years i've thought that Suse is stronger as a desktop than a
server.)

<final gripe>
And Kubuntu supports my GigaBit NIC out of the box, which Suse doesn't.
To get it working under Suse i had to a) google until i found a forum
talking about the driver, b) go download the driver sources from
RealTek, c) hack its sources because it had typos which prevented it
from compiling, d) install it. And repeat (d) every time i upgraded my
kernel (which, granted, wasn't so often because the 10.1 update tools
are so hosed).
Fine - not every distro can get every driver included. But i can't even
get this driver through online updates with Suse, whereas Kubuntu "just
has it", even though they're using an older kernel than Suse 10.1 does.
</final gripe>


This is the longest mail i've written in some time. i hope that anyone
replying to it will have the decency to liberally SNIP out large parts
before posting back to the list ;). And, just as importantly, i hope it
hasn't upset anyone or offended anyone's sense of decency or propriety.
Suse is still good. But Kubuntu is also good.

:)

--
----- stephan at s11n.net   http://s11n.net
"...pleasure is a grace and is not obedient to the commands
of the will." -- Alan W. Watts

-------------------------------------------------------

-- 
----- stephan at s11n.net   http://s11n.net
"...pleasure is a grace and is not obedient to the commands
of the will." -- Alan W. Watts
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/attachments/20060821/2cf1740f/attachment.pgp>