The “Break it Down” Blog

Be sure to start off reading Part 1 of this piece of you are interested in how the installation of SLED went.

Because using an operating system is typically organic, I am going to update this post as a stream-of-thought post to give snippets of information to the reader about how my tasks are progressing.

• A bit surprising, but good news is that SUSE now uses Gnome as it’s default desktop. For those of you that are long time SUSE users it was always based on KDE and QT (for their admin tools liks YaST). AFAIKT YaST and the other admin tools are still based on QT but the main desktop and surely the future of SUSE is all on Gnome. The sweet new Computer menu, apps menu and basic wizards seems to be all Gnome.
• I think it looks great, but some of you on slower machines will notice that the sluggishness of GTK is still there just like it is on Ubuntu or Fedora. On faster machines it’s not a big deal, but I still notice it. On slower machines I can imagine folks, especially ones that use KDE, getting really pissed off at the lag caused when resizing, moving or adjusting the window in any way. Typical operations do not require these activities so you mostly won’t notice it, but when you do execute these steps you’ll see the sluggish repainting lag right away. No idea what GTK’s plan for improving this is, I know it’s been a hot topic for over 2 years now, and a lesser topic before that. Originally a lot of people blamed Pango and the text layout/painting code, but after quite a bit of work and further benchmarking with straight components people found that the repainting in general was just slow. There is hope that moving ontop of Cairo will mitigate this problem moving forward even though the initial releases are a bit slower. Who knows, let’s keep our fingers crossed. As I’ve said in the past this has likely never become a major poster-child problem for the project because the speed is “Good enough” in 90% of use cases. Most people don’t sit around all day long resizing/moving windows.
• Desktop comes preinstalled with a ton of useful software, pretty much everything you would need if you are Joe-user. Joe-user meaning you are specifically a graphic artist, gamer or someone with special needs like that.
• I had Evolution and Firefox open then fired up GAIM to setup my accounts. A system dialog popped up asking me to create a key-chain password and locked up the whole system, I had to ALT-CTRL-Backspace out of the desktop.
• Keyboard input seems to be flaky. When typing I will sometimes have double or triple entries for the same key. For example I was trying to type “www” into firefox to get to a new address and I was unable to. I either ended up with “ww” or “wwwwwww”. Hitting backspace didn’t help as it would execute 1 or more times never leaving me with 3 w’s.
• While typing this in Firefox I am constantly correcting my typing as this multi-type thing is occuring a lot.
• None of the installed movie players will play anything from either Gamespot (video segments either in Firefox or downloaded. High quality or low) or Quicktime Trailers. May not be annoying to most, but it’s annoying to me.
• Java worked out of the box both the local runtime and webstart. I use Wurm Online as my test. The version that ships is 1.4.2_11 where I believe 1.4.2_12 is the most recent update stable release. Either way not too bad, not everyone has moved to 1.5.0 yet as a lot of people expect Mustang (1.6.0 / 6.0) to be the switchover version as 1.5.0 was short lived and didn’t contain enough updates to justify the transfer for a lot of folks simply making use of the runtime.
• By default the DPI of X was set to 132 for some reason so all the text on my desktop was huge. I didn’t play with this, but typically the default of 72 on Windows looks fine to me, no idea why it was set so high.
• Some of the icons are ugly:
  
• The splash screens for some of the programs like Gimp and OpenOffice are customized by Novell to fit the desktop. I think they look great and help with the “integrated” feel:
  
• Integrated searching (Beagle) is absolutely awesome. As soon as you popup the Computer link (Equivalent to Start Menu in windows) the Search field is focused so you can just start typing and hit enter immediately, I dig it:
  
• You’ll notice from the Computer popup that there is not an expand button or All Programs button to see all the software installed in a typical fly-out menu option. That is done by clicking More Applications… This link will popup showing you all the installed software by category: A/V, Browse, Communication, Games, IMages, Office, System and Tools. The interface is nice, has a filter which makes it easy to trim down the list and categories if you just want to browse around. Over all I really like the approach. It’s clean and honestly I have found myself just using Beagle to load things (must how I do on my Mac with Spotlight) instead of using the menu like I do on Windows. The only downside to that is you always have the Beagle results window open after you are done doing your search, so you gotta close it. (Maybe someone is planning on writing a Quicksilver-like extension for SLED/Gnome?). Here’s a screenshot of the More Applications… dialog:
  
• You’ll notice there is no aparent link on the left hand side to install more software. That is done from the Software Installer application listed under System. From there you get what I would consider a very anorexic old-school flat list of all possible applications that could be installed along with a filter box:
  
  This box should have been similar to the More Applications… dialog that shows the potential installable applications by category along with the filter box. A tree structure may have worked best but I’m not fond of the flat-list-approach. You’ll see I typed in “print” in the filter box and now need to wade my way through a long list of packages to see if what I want is in there. This certainly isn’t bad, just plain-Jane compared to the other polish that SUSE has done for the other administrative tasks.

A very rough ball-park-ey phrase that you could take away from my impressions of SLED to sum everything up is: It feels like a brighter slightly more in-depth version of Ubuntu (in some areas). What I mean is that Ubuntu is absolutely a polished distrobution. Nothing in SLED compares to Synaptic for installing applications. However the update applet and some of the other polish in SLED feels somewhat similar to Ubuntu. Ubuntu adds it’s own custom applications to try and stream line working with your operating system in a lot of areas. Some of those pieces of software like Synaptic go very deep with features, others like the Add/Remove menu applet or update manager are meant to be simplier and stay that way. SUSE does this as well, however it throws in more of these types of user-friendly applications so you don’t have to modify config files. Take for example installing XGL or my dual head setup on SLED, it was about 20x easier than Ubuntu. On Ubuntu AFAIKT the resolution config applet is straight Gnome and completely generic, it doesn’t actually do anything useful. On SLED it is a completely separate application that is quite intelligent and useful as I was able to configure my video drivers and X settings with clicking my mouse, no “sudo nano /etc/X11/…” or anything like that.

There are things I’m not crazy about ini SLED. It doesn’t feel as polished as Ubuntu. Ubuntu may not bring to the table as many custom applications, but the ones it does bring are tied together very tightly. SLED also feels a little less tight because of all the legacy QT applications that haven’t been ported yet, but that’s not a huge deal, just one of those things that stand out and you might not like. This is completely subjective but I feel like Gnome on SLED is slower than it is on my Ubuntu install. I have no quantitative numbers to suggest why, only that resizing and moving Evolution around on SLED feels a heck of a lot slower than it does on Ubuntu (Reminder: I don’t have XGL turned on as it kept locking the desktop up).

Some of the icons in the icon set for SLED are ugly. I don’t know why Novell tried to tackle the icon-set arena. Good icons are as hard as making a good application and take just as much time. My suggestion is to stick with what was already there and work with the Gnome group on new ones if they needed them. Most of the icons look fine, the ones that don’t look fine really are not good (see screenshot above).

So SLED gets a knock against the stability and cohesiveness of the desktop, but gets major points for the intelligence of it’s system-based applications. All the way from the installer that detected my RAID setup and knew just how to partition the disks to the hardware detection of my system all the way to the easy configuration of my video setup. Bravo to the Novell team on getting people off the command line for tasks like this. Consider that Xinerama has been in X for what, 6 years now (maybe shorter) and I’m still not aware of a GUI front end that lets me configure it like SLED did.

SLED also gets points for trying to integrate apps more into the desktop with the custom splash screens and great new Computer menu. I am predicting and hoping that we see something like that come into the next release of Ubuntu (Edgy).

Scoring:

• Installation: 8.5/10 - The installation should have clarified that registration was necessary for an update site with a popup or something like that (It’s probably in the text I didn’t read).
• Hardware Support: 7/10 - Sound, network and other hardware was detected fine. Video card was detected but monitors were mis-detected and a pain to correct or atleast not as clear as they should have been.
• Applications: 8.5/10 - I think everything is there. I had no reason to dig around the Software Installer dialog as everything I needed was installed already. Additionally the system administration tools were great from what I used.
• User Experience (w/o XGL): 7/10 - Pretty similar to other Gnome-based desktops. Some of the new approaches like the Computer menu are fantastic. The update applet and some other touches like the custom splash screens were nice. Apps seemed on the sluggish side though.
• User Experience (w/ XGL): 8.8/10 - Cool and “wow” factor is really great. The default settings give a fantastic feel and I wish I could have kept this running even though it kept locking my machine up. I didn’t subtract points for that because I have 4 other friends running SLED that have no issues with XGL so my impressions are given assuming it ran fine.
• Overall: 8/10 - Good release. Needs some more time in the oven (XGL/QT-based apps/Performance) but the potential there is big. I think the release of SLED 10 will give a lot of people a great impression and when the next major release rolls out (SLED 11?) when the team has had enough time to gain momentum on fixing with the help of a lot of user feedback and testing everything will fall into place.
• Would I Switch? Not yet, but soon. The out-of-box experience for me using SLED was easier than Ubuntu although I feel Ubuntu gives a more stable cohesive experience (likely because Ubuntu has had a long while to normalize on Gnome and pull loose ends together). If SLED was completely Gnome based and I had gotten XGL working out of the box, my answer would have been Yes. The ease of use is going to be fantastic for the enterprise customers that choose to roll it out in my opinion.

This concludes my review and assessment of SLED 10 RC3 Preview. It is an excellent product and Novell is headed in the right direction. Keep it up! (Digg this)