openSUSE Linux: What’s Working Well and What To Do With It
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Sorry informationweek.com ICNR 
Despite the fact that it’s been around since 1994, openSUSE Linux remains a work in progress. It’s not 
perfect, nor does anyone pretend it is. The places where it needs the most immediate improvement are also a matter of debate: what’s crucially important to some is only marginally important to others. Still, there’s no question that there are key areas where openSUSE Linux is superior — not just adding individual features, but things that are actively functional. I’m going to run down several major areas where openSUSE Linux, as an operating system and as a platform, is cool.
Package Management
The way packages (RPM packages in the case of openSUSE Linux) are handled is with a complete package management stack that is built around libzypp. It consists of several applications that take care of all the gory details of software installation. The package format lets you express hard or weak dependencies, suggestions for completion of other software, versions, conflicts and so on. The tools can handle single packages, patches or groups of packages called patterns. If you are using openSUSE odds are you obtain the software you need from the distribution’s repository with a click and be done with it. But this is not the coolest thing. openSUSE provides everboy, including commercial software vendors the means to offer their products for Linux. Not only openSUSE Linux but also every other major Linux Distribution out there using one unified tool: the openSUSE Build Service. Potential program vendors have a lot of choices:
1) devote time and effort — and money — (like with any other operating system) to ensuring that their program installs, runs, and stays cohesive on a variety of distributions.
2) Push their programs from their Build Service repository to a given distro’s repository. For openSUSE this works even with the Build Service Collaboration features.
3) Use their own instance of the openSUSE Build Service and provide the software repositories on their own infastructure.
Option #3 is pretty much the best solution for any proprietary software vendor. #1 Ensures that the commercial vendor takes care of the Linux portion of his customers #2, which has the advantage of making applications immediately available to the user of any given distribution, and cuts down on the amount of work needed by an end user to get something installed.
Because the demand for commercial apps on Linux is relatively slender right now, this solution isn’t as pronounced: most people just get their offerings from their local repository. In the long run, though, if commercial apps take root on Linux, it will become that much bigger an chance to making Linux a platform for the commercial vendors application.
Good article. A nice parody of the original.
This is a good article that shows why openSUSE is a great distribution.
At some point, there needs to be a distinction between developer terms and consumer terms. Most consumers have no idea of what a build service is. 1-Click install is for people who don’t know anything about computers and many of those people use Windows, and Windows had 1-Click install since Windows 95 (not drawing a comparison, because there are differences – don’t mean to stir an argument).
My point is that this great distribution not only needs developer terms for the community, it needs consumer terms to make the case to non-computer-geeks. And, if this were accomplished, I’m sure everyone involved would implicitly understand the meaning of it all.