OpenSUSE 11.1: Evolution dependent on Mono

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 23 December 2008 01:11

Opinion and Analysis

The good thing about OpenSUSE 11.1 is the change of licence. Version 11 had a licence that, in some of the betas, had draconian clauses like this: "The Software may contain an automatic disabling mechanism that prevents its use after a certain period of time, so You should back up Your system and take other measures to prevent any loss of files or data.  Use of the Software is entirely at Your own risk." In the final release, this particular clause was absent.

The licence in version 11.1 prevents redistribution with the OpenSUSE trademark after modification, but that apart it has been considerably loosened.

The live CD with KDE4 is sadly out of tune; many basic things do not work. For example, I could not even add some extensions to Firefox. This, by the way, is no fault of KDE4 for I have used it on other distributions and the experience is different. Once Novell took over SuSE, the American influence began to assert itself - the proof is here again.

The GNOME live CD is a much better effort. But the program menus are ugly. The login screen is illogical - if a single non-root user is present on the system, it seems silly to make one click on that username to get a dialog box to enter the password.

The rest of the so-called improvements can be seen in this Novell release. But bear in mind that several of these "delights" cannot be experienced unless you are willing to risk patent problems and leave Mono on your system.

Here's a quote that says it much better than I ever could: "Mono is all about getting existing Windows applications, and their Microsoft-proprietary dependencies, installed on to your Linux system, so that you will in the near future require a paid-for license from Microsoft to run programs on your Linux system."