Disney has announced that Donald Duck is being renamed Ducky Duck, and from now on in will be colored teal, in keeping with the bird theme.

And Bear Alignment ™ has announced that their famous, but previously anonymous, bear mascot would be named Bear-ie Bear, and from now on in will be colored white to stand out from its other corporate color schemes.

And Warner Brothers, in a quick response to Disney, has announced that their Tasmanian Devil will be renamed Devon Devil, and will have its pigment changed to a deep cerulean blue, to complement the usually red theme associated with other devils.

And finally, (for now), in an attempt to outflank Red Hat, it is rumored that Novell is considering creating a mascot for openSUSE Linux. “Susie Linucks (no trademark conflict)” will be rainbow-colored (to avoid excluding anyone), and is rumored to be able to sing and dance as well as pose for cover art. It is hard to tell if this will be enough to stop Red Hat from naming a new mascot for Fedora, “Federico Fedora”, to be rendered in caution light orange, in order to promote brand recognition, since orange is a member of the red family.

Meanwhile, the mascot “Zeppo Zypper” is reported to be more than a little p***ed off, claiming that it has been shunted aside before even being given a chance to make his mark. (The fact that his mark was to be yellow may have something to do with that.)

But more seriously, what makes a Linux distro good IMHO is that it provides both a simple, easy to manage desktop GUI interface (with minimal install issues), and also provides the ability to manage the system from the command line (ideally conforming as much as possible to standard Linux/Unix concepts). A third key point would be that the OS does not contain lots of little useless “frills” that require tweaking to get rid of.

So openSUSE (and especially KDE4) need more work to meet the smooth GUI standard. (And we know who the 800 lb. gorilla is in this category). And openSUSE could certainly benefit from keeping functions such as update easier to use, instead of “cute”…but it does not benefit from having needless additional baggage. Not even so that everyone can make a contribution. (The OS is not a third grade parent’s day display.)

BUT THE ONE BIG QUESTION THAT HAS BEEN MISSING: why yast in the first place? It stopped working behind several people’s firewalls according to reports, beginning at 10.3. Meanwhile, zypper looks like a much easier to configure interface. Why yast instead of zypper? What was the problem with zypper that yast solves?

And yo! if the spam protection asks for the sum of four and 9, it should take either 13 or thirteen…interfaces should accept the obvious, even when the obvious is ambiguous.

Tell me, oh enlightened and benevolent one, how would you “get rid of me”? A bullet? A knife in the back…oh wait, that was already done by…YOU!, a garrotte? Would someone like you have the cods to do the ‘getting rid of’ or would you hire out?

Instead, how about whiners like you allow one and all to post their opinions. If you don’t like it, you’re free to jump out of a window from the 30th floor of a building so nothing else will scar your delicate sensibilities anymore.

Like a few others with common sense have said, quit worrying about a pathetically inane ‘mascot’ for YaST and simply fix the things that need fixing instead of adding crap that doesn’t need to be added!

Welcome to the beginning of ‘OpenDisneyWorld’. I think I’ll go puke now.

Dan Goodman
Felipe Alvarez
can’t agree more with what you said.