From GNOME to KDE and Back: Computing Habits Hard to Break
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 21st Mar 2008 21:49 UTC
Editorial "I used KDE as my primary desktop from 1996 through 2006, when I installed the GNOME version of Ubuntu and found that I liked it better than the KDE desktop I'd faced every morning for so many years. Last January, I got a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop and decided to install Kubuntu on it, but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME. Does this mean GNOME is now a better desktop than KDE, or just that I have become so accustomed to GNOME that it's hard for me to give it up?"
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RE[5]: Kubuntus fault
by elsewhere on Sun 23rd Mar 2008 04:44 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: Kubuntus fault"
elsewhere
Member since:
2005-07-13

I have never mixed different versions of repos. Nor would I call it dependency hell. Its just damn unfriendly, I can usually resolve these issued when that idiot box full of red and yellow highlights full of garbage text (incidentally zypper does the same but without the pretty colours) pops up telling me that there a conflict in packages that have been supplied by another repo.


I keep hearing people imply dependency issues, yet they can never provide examples. If there are dependency issues, it's a bug in the packaging that the developers should be made aware of.

The other problem is reckless abandonment when it comes to adding repos from the build-service; some of them are clear in purpose, but adding sources from the experimental or developmental areas will result in conflicts, and that's by design, since those packages are often designed to replace core components.

As for the external repos, namely packman and guru, they are packaged specifically to not interfere with core packages. The only time a conflict will generally occur is if you try to update packages while having those sources disabled, which can cause conflicts since zypper can only resolve against the core packages that are obsoleted by the external repos.

I won't argue that dependency issues don't occur, in fact there is a common one with the KDE4 packages as the devs try and work on communal existence with KDE3, but I'd also say that in 9/10 cases where I've seen users run into dependency or unresolvable issues, it's because they've installed sources that should not really have been installed, so I'm admittedly cynical when I see blanket complaints about dependency issues. Particularly since I abuse my own system, with various OBS sources, and even intentionally mixing repos from stable and development, without running into the "frequent" dependency issues other people seem to with a standard config.

Its also fairly annoying that all the yast programs are separate.


Yast is a management infrastructure. Package management is one small part of what Yast provides. If Yast didn't separate the applications and functions, it would be a little cumbersome from a useability POV to have single application managing packages, security configuration, firewall settings, samba, apache, ssh, ftp, nfs, ldap, mail services, dns, dhcp, user management, sudo settings, network devices, audio hardware, display settings, bluetooth configuration, system updates, modem settings, isdn, pptp, desktop preferences, kernel settings, PCI settings, disk partitioning, LVM, bootmanager config, backups, harware profile management, and a few dozen other areas I have overlooked.

Yast is a complete environment, even with multiple programming interfaces, for supporting system management applications. Dismissing it because you don't like the package management is like dismissing Gnome because you don't like Nautilus or dismissing KDE because you don't like Konqueror. They're important components, but not solely representative of what the entire infrastructure can provide.

Maybe I just like synaptic or adept and their speed too much. Searching for packages in adept is even faster than synaptic.


.deb will always have an advantage there, since it's a package format that is basically proprietary to debian. It wasn't designed for non-Debian based systems, it doesn't have the file-based dependency system that rpm does (which frankly makes rpm a better "universal" solution that works without requiring an arbitrary set of packaging guidelines), so it doesn't have the same amount of meta-data to parse. I've used .deb on Ubuntu, and I won't deny it's "faster", but if RedHat and openSUSE decided on their own proprietary packaging formats specific to their own platforms, they'd have the same advantage.

On the whole I would describe the apt system and the gui related tools in (k)ubuntu as being much more streamlined and more importantly easy for new users.


This I won't argue, I'll be the first to admit that Yast package management could be a little more intuitive, and it's age is showing. But that is something they're looking at.

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