Bug 106021

OpenSuse is very impressive. However the primary feature required of a program 
intended for 'non-technical' users is that it be easy to install.  
 
OpenSuse currently requires the downloading and burning of no less than Five 
CDs. This is beyond the patience of most non-technical users. Furthermore it 
is unnecessary and wastes the bandwidth of users and of the mirror 
organizations. This is particularly evident when realizing that the 4th and 
5th CDs are only used for a few dozen megabytes worth of data, when the 
download of these two CDs alone takes over 1GB.  
 
On top of the problem of sheer size of download, there is the problem of 
incompleteness. I was hoping to port some wxpython programs from windows to 
linux. However, there appears to be no wxpython packages at all in the default 
CD-only installation of OpenSuse.  
 
Only by changing my installation source to an ftp mirror of SuSE was I able to 
find the appropriate wxpython packages. Aside from the fact that I can't 
figure out why the ftp site has different packages than the 2.4 GB of CDs I 
just downloaded, it was only a stroke of luck at google that let me know I 
could change my installation source in the first place. 
 
A better alternative is to have a single OpenSuse installation CD that, by 
default, uses an 'install from network' feature to download the rest of the 
system from the internet. Even better would be adding a p2p bittorrent type of 
feature on top of this. Everyone would save bandwidth this way.  
 
This change alone would increase usage of OpenSuse a lot because the biggest 
problem for non-technical users of computers is getting things installed in 
the first place.  
 
Thank you.