OpenSuSE 11: A Brief Review
Wednesday, 2. July 2008, 18:10:38
Few days ago I installed OpenSuSE 11. There were three reasons for it:
1) My friend recommended trying it
2) It was released on my birthday
3) It had KDE4
It was out and I rushed to the faculty (they have good internet there) to download OpenSuSE 11 DVD (yes, biggy). It contained GNOME, KDE3 and KDE4 desktops and ofcourse being a modern man I chose KDE4 without much of thought.
KDE 4
I'm a big fan of KDE, but KDE 4.0 disappointed me. Looks were kinda good, but that's about it. Everytime I logged in to my desktop I got KNotify4 crash reported and KNetworkManager (though it used one from KDE3, I believe) was crashing as well (or more like: didn't start). Also it lacked one of my favourite features: the file server applet (it was something my friend Rick missed too). It misses some other small things as well.
So I decided KDE4 is not ready for my desktop and there I was looking at the screen suggesting one of these: GNOME, KDE3, KDE4. This time I chose KDE3.
P.S. I heard that KDE 4.1 is more stable and usable.
KDE 3
KDE 3.5 desktop was wonderfull as always. OpenSuSE has a nice (heard other oppinions as well) modification to the KMenu, whick makes it look more like the one found in KDE4.
It came with standard KNetworkManager, which I like a bit less than the one that comes with KUbuntu, but it has all the needed features.
Drivers
I installed OpenSuSE on my laptop and devices like memory card reader, soundcard (I will talk a bit about it later), network card, BlueTooth worked out of the box.
Video: OpenSuSE allows adding special repository that has packages for ATI video drivers.
Wireless: I have an Atheros chipset, so I added madwifi repository and all worked fine.
Conclusion. It would have been nice, if adding repositories and installing drivers had bin done for me. (For example in Ubuntu you get notified about restricted (proprietary) driver use, but they get installed).
Things like screen brightness adjustment and ACPI worked well too.
Now Touchpad was another problem as horizontal scroll area occupied bottom 50% of the touchpad and I had to manually edit Xorg.conf to fix this.
Drivers: Sound
Well sound is a Linux problem. It seams that ALSA doesn't love Realtek HD audio and doesn't allow muting internal laptop speakers, so I use OSS (Open Sound System) instead.
Packages
It's called YaST. It works good.
OpenSuSE's wiki has links to lots of repositories, so you won't need to compile much. Also it comes with zypper console utility (similar to apt-get or yum).
Updating is very fast as OpenSuSE uses xdelta packages, which contain only the differences between new and old package versions.
One disappointing thing is that YaST can not resume package downloads. If your PC crashes during package download, next time you have to start it all over. But this is not a problem for broadband owners.
Overall impression
It's nice and fast. After all the configurations are done, it works really well. YaST2 makes configuring system settings easy. So if you're planning to switch to another Linux distribution, OpenSuSE is really worth a try.
1) My friend recommended trying it
2) It was released on my birthday
3) It had KDE4
It was out and I rushed to the faculty (they have good internet there) to download OpenSuSE 11 DVD (yes, biggy). It contained GNOME, KDE3 and KDE4 desktops and ofcourse being a modern man I chose KDE4 without much of thought.
KDE 4
I'm a big fan of KDE, but KDE 4.0 disappointed me. Looks were kinda good, but that's about it. Everytime I logged in to my desktop I got KNotify4 crash reported and KNetworkManager (though it used one from KDE3, I believe) was crashing as well (or more like: didn't start). Also it lacked one of my favourite features: the file server applet (it was something my friend Rick missed too). It misses some other small things as well.
So I decided KDE4 is not ready for my desktop and there I was looking at the screen suggesting one of these: GNOME, KDE3, KDE4. This time I chose KDE3.
P.S. I heard that KDE 4.1 is more stable and usable.
KDE 3
KDE 3.5 desktop was wonderfull as always. OpenSuSE has a nice (heard other oppinions as well) modification to the KMenu, whick makes it look more like the one found in KDE4.
It came with standard KNetworkManager, which I like a bit less than the one that comes with KUbuntu, but it has all the needed features.
Drivers
I installed OpenSuSE on my laptop and devices like memory card reader, soundcard (I will talk a bit about it later), network card, BlueTooth worked out of the box.
Video: OpenSuSE allows adding special repository that has packages for ATI video drivers.
Wireless: I have an Atheros chipset, so I added madwifi repository and all worked fine.
Conclusion. It would have been nice, if adding repositories and installing drivers had bin done for me. (For example in Ubuntu you get notified about restricted (proprietary) driver use, but they get installed).
Things like screen brightness adjustment and ACPI worked well too.
Now Touchpad was another problem as horizontal scroll area occupied bottom 50% of the touchpad and I had to manually edit Xorg.conf to fix this.
Drivers: Sound
Well sound is a Linux problem. It seams that ALSA doesn't love Realtek HD audio and doesn't allow muting internal laptop speakers, so I use OSS (Open Sound System) instead.
Packages
It's called YaST. It works good.
OpenSuSE's wiki has links to lots of repositories, so you won't need to compile much. Also it comes with zypper console utility (similar to apt-get or yum).
Updating is very fast as OpenSuSE uses xdelta packages, which contain only the differences between new and old package versions.
One disappointing thing is that YaST can not resume package downloads. If your PC crashes during package download, next time you have to start it all over. But this is not a problem for broadband owners.
Overall impression
It's nice and fast. After all the configurations are done, it works really well. YaST2 makes configuring system settings easy. So if you're planning to switch to another Linux distribution, OpenSuSE is really worth a try.
