Spanspek

After my previous complaints, a disaster happened the other night which sealed it for me. Don't get me wrong: I love Linux for web development (in my case, PHP and Javascript), but for the casual user, it has to get a lot better.

Opensuse has automatic software updates somewhat like OSX's Software Update, but less intrusive. I'd had problems with it lately because some daemon or other wouldn't run. Anyway, I found a way around that using Yast and just accepted whatever it said (which is what most people would do).

Upon restart, Linux wouldn't log me in and didn't even start up X and KDE. Successive restarts, attempted diagnosis and repairs, made no difference. I suppose there is a way to do on the command line but I'm not a command line kind of guy (other than the starting Apache, and the odd filesystem operation).

So I had to copy essential stuff (PHP and JS scripts, the odd document and my mysql databases) and re-install.

Well, it could be worse. When I first installed Suse, I chose ReiserFS (filesystem) since that was the recommendation. Who knew that a couple of years later, Reiser would be arrested and charged for murdering his wife. So I've changed to ext3.

Now I have to be sure to disable any experimental repositories before running updates. Haven't run an update yet. :-|