[i336_]

It probably didn't come across as well as I was hoping, but I wasn't going for a scathing-review motif. I could probably have couched my response a little more comfortably though. Kudos for the brave face and the positive reaction :)

Also, I didn't make the connection that you were the article author (!) - your followup on here has been admirable and impressive. Not many of the people who submit OC (of sorts) also follow up.

And thanks for writing this, it's definitely made me very curious about trying out OpenSuSE - or more accurately why I would try it. I'm using Arch at the moment, but I might be exploring in future :)

The AUR is pretty amazing, though... I don't use it that much, but it's nice that I've been able to install the stuff I have wanted with a single command. I get the impression there isn't a comparable alternative to this for SuSE...?

[rbrownsuse]

There is the graphical option, using http://software.opensuse.org and the 1-click install functionality there to add packages direct from OBS

on the commandline, there is a plugin for osc (the OBS commandline tool) https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/openSUSE:Tools/osc-p...

This enables 'osc install $foo' which will search the build service for package $foo and install it, which I believe to be the closest approximation of what you expect from AUR

[i336_]

I noticed the 1-click install system, that's kinda cute :P (I have a vaguely similar experience when I go, er, Slackware package fishing.)

It seems to me that OpenSuSE (and SuSE itself) follows a philosophy of using centralized build management and verification, with a policy that supports minimal (if any) local from-source recompilation. Basically the exact opposite approach to Gentoo, the only distribution where gcc is more important than eth0 :P

This centralized model is actually exactly what I've been pining for for a very long time - an approach that a) verifies that XYZ works right in a central location, then distributes that known-working configuration, and b) creates an environment where clients are built using solely using such known-working configuration objects, and are thus relatively easily reproducible at scale.

I'm obviously testing OpenSuSE sometime in the short to medium term :D here's hoping it works out well for me in practice!

I'd heard of the OBS, but I didn't know the (Open)SuSE ecosystem was wrapped around it quite like I do now.

The one question I do have now is, where do you think OpenSuSE sits in relation to functional (ie static/absolute) package management? The distributed-known-working-blob approach sounds like it would fit in incredibly well with a model like what the Nix package manager uses.

Of course the current OpenSuSE ecosystem doesn't use this approach so adding it tomorrow would provide nothing unless everyone shifted mindsets, which would naturally not happen anytime soon. I'm just curious about what would happen if the two ideas were combined, since they don't seem to be particularly mutually exclusive or conflicting, and the result sounds like it might be potentially shiny and interesting (and possibly very powerful). And non-relative configuration sounds like the future (to me at least).