I left openSUSE 3 years ago, and for good reason, it sucked. It was buggy, bloated, slow, and horribly unfriendly to use. So let's skip ahead 3 years to the present, openSUSE 11.0 is out and I'm ready to forgive past mistakes and give them another shot.
To be quite honest, as soon as I put in the DVD and saw the boot screen I knew something was different, it had the same old SUSE green but it had a fresh feel to it. This wasn't going to be the same SUSE that made my tear my hair out in frustration 3 years ago, so I quicly decided to come into this review with an open mind and a fresh pair of eyes.
After a not-so-unexpectedly long boot into the extremely pretty DVD installer, I got to work following through the oodly familiar install process (it's been 3 years, you'd think I could have forgotten about SUSE by now). Oddly enough there was an EULA(?) to accept, it appeard to be a standard trademark/copyright protection deal so I agreed to it and moved on with the install.
After switching to Ubuntu 3 years ago, I have become a GNOME convert and have done everything in my power to avoid KDE. Thankfully openSUSE has decided to include GNOME recently, seeing this option I gleefully checked it and continued on with the install. Oh, did I mention that the installer is extremely pretty? Just pointing it out!
Couple friendly setup screens later I'm at the worst part of any install, the wait, and wait I did. About an hour later on my 2.0GhZ P4 (old, I know) the installer finally finished running, cleaned itself up, and rebooted.
Unfortunately I was a little dissapointed when I rebooted and let the first-boot druid run. I had just gone from this extremely shiny and pretty installer to what looked like a run-of-the-mill GTK druid, I mean, I know the installer is a QT4 app (not that I like QT mind you), but a little consistency here would be nice.
But eventually after an agonizingly long 1 and a half I was finally done, GNOME was loading on top of a traditional green SUSE background. But this isn't your daddy's GNOME, Novell has taken great strides to make it their own.
By far, this has to be the most customized GNOME setup I have even seen, everything from the panel layout to the theme, even to the main menu has been changed. And to be honest, it's all for the better. Novell has taken what I consider the best desktop enviornment by far, and taken the concept even further. GNOME in openSUSE 11 really feels like one coherent enviornment, everything from the default apps to how you launch them just feels 'right'.
Obviously long-time GNOME users may resist such dramatic changes, but *this* is what GNOME is all about. You don't worry about or care what your applications are, you just care about getting stuff done, nothing jumps out and says touch me, it's all about what you are doing.
To be quite honest, there's only one thing that I can even compare to this, and that is Microsoft's short lived Longhorn project. With the tightly integrated Beagle search, to the nice application launcher, and yes, even YaST (which I used to despise so).
So let's bring our focus to SUSE's dare-to-be-different main menu (which still opens via Alt-F1 although the super key would feel more appropriate with it's positioning). While it's certainly a break from the norm of the GNOME system menu and GNOME main menu applets, it's a nice change. One thing Apple and (to a much lesser extent) Microsoft have focused on in recent versions of their operating system's is integrated search. Now while some distro's have taken a small step forward by including Tracker, Beagle, or other search tools, none of them have gone as far as SUSE has.
Entering text into the search field on the SUSE main menu will launch the Beagle search tool, which has silently been running in the background since you booted indexing all of your data, from emails to your web history. There's no hunting through menus or accidentally hitting a random key combination to expose this functionality, because it's sitting there, staring at you, each and every time you open up the main menu.
As always SUSE has taken the "everything and the kitchen sink, plus another house" approach, including everything most people could ever use. Unfortunately if you don't like the default app selecitons the repo's aren't exactly jam packed with alternatives, and is likely the killing point for me, at least, to making SUSE your primary distro. However for the casual, or even experienced linux user without a need or desire for specific applications, SUSE is really a great choice.
Now excuse me while I reinstall Ubuntu and make it look exactly like SUSE ^.^
Comments
Final thoughts
So in the end for me, openSUSE 11.0 was actually a great experience, the default app choices were sensible, but their packages for alternative's (such as epiphany) are usually buggy or out of date, so it does feel like they aren't giving other applications the love they deserve. I was also saddened to see the lack of ruby-gtk bindings in the repo's, which really shocked me.
I do see SUSE as the future of linux distro's, and this is what other distro's need to aim for, but lackluster repo's (and a crappy compiz wrapper that doesn't configure compiz for my video card correctly) ruined the experience for me.
Stefan Nuxoll
menu
I found the SLAB menu in gnome to be a throwback to the win3.1 program manager. Why do I want an entire window to pop open when I want an app not on the main menu? It's awful.
Much better is the way Mint has done the menu in their gnome release. Suse would do well to make that their own.
I found a few showstoppers myself. I never could get smb4k to work, for one.
I do like YAST, however, and do not see what all of the hate out their is about. Certainly can't be from people who have used v11.
When you're like me and you
When you're like me and you have more than 10 applications installed browsing through the GNOME menu becomes horribly tedious, I don't actually use the app finder very much and instead I use beagle to launch my apps.
As for YaST, in previous versions of SUSE it has caused great amounts of pain for many users, especially it's lackluster package managment and it's special way of breaking your xorg.conf if you decide to use their graphics/keyboard/mouse config tools on a customized xorg.conf. Most of my issues have been fixed in the new version of YaST and I must say it's quite nice, especially the obvious LDAP setup.
Stefan Nuxoll
Same REPO issues for the KDE version ?
Great review, Stefan.
Would the repo issues be the same for the KDE version of OpenSUSE 11 ?
The KDE and GNOME editions
The KDE and GNOME editions share the same repo's, they're just different sets of default packages. Just like Ubuntu.
Stefan Nuxoll
I want to know the answer too
I would like to know is the repo issue the same?
Peter
http://www.dealsvista.com
For 11.0 it is the same, I
For 11.0 it is the same, I haven't tested OpenSUSE 11.1 yet due to a lack of time. Maybe once my life settles down I'll have time to do some reviews again, I already have three lined up on my list.
Stefan Nuxoll
Repositories
> the repo's aren't exactly jam packed with alternatives
Um, did you add from these?:
http://en.opensuse.org/Package_Repositories
http://en.opensuse.org/YaST_package_repository
http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories
Takes all of a minute or two.
Yes, I did add them, and I
Yes, I did add them, and I still find myself missing many packages I use. After seeing three comments about these I feel like you are taking this as a personal attack or something, which I assure you it's not. It's just somewhat annoying when I can't get the software *I* personally use easily without digging through the suse build service (which I greatly like, need to learn to make .rpm's myself, have made a few .deb's already).
Stefan Nuxoll
Old Love
For me it's a deja vu, I left Suse also 3 years before and an using Ubuntu. No I'm back to oepnSuse and I like it more than before
Nice blog you got here. Just
Nice blog you got here. Just checked out your opensuse 11 review and a few things jumped out at me.
Suse has included gnome since as far back as I can remember (been using it since 8.2). Over the years, the flavour of gnome shipped by suse has become more and more customized.
The installer went through a lot of work for 11.0, but it truly still needs a lot more polish.
In terms of install speed, I can't speak for the dvd, but the live cd for 11.0 includes pre-packaged image installs that reduces installation time drastically (<10 mins vs ~30 mins on my laptop).
I'm not an epiphany user, but opensuse 11.0 shipped with epiphany 2.22, which seems to be the last stable release and therefore was probably the most recent when 11.0 shipped. Five or so years ago, the common complaint was that suse's support for anything beyond core packages lagged quite a bit. That hasn't been the case for a while now and being one of those people that always has to have the bleeding edge version of software, I have yet to be disappointed by opensuse's package selection.
You have to keep in mind that packages are named/handled differently by most distros, so just because a particular package is not found does not mean the functionality is not included in a different package.
Indeed, there are some things that you won't find on the default opensuse repo/dvd. Nowadays, yast includes a community repo list, where users can pick and choose which repos they want to enable or disable. It makes adding repos that much more streamlined.
While I'm on the topic of packages, I feel I have to mention the opensuse build service and the one click installer, which makes building, finding and installing packages a joy. These two really haven't gotten the exposure they deserve, considering how many light years they are ahead of everything else out there. Link for the search frontend if you want to check it out: http://software.opensuse.org/search
Opensuse is lacking in a large number of things (I file usability/enhancement bugs as quickly as I run into them), but package selection and package management in general is definitely not one of them. Not anymore.
My response is not to try to imply that my linux is better than your linux, - to each their own I say - but rather to point out a few things you may not be aware of.
I did actually find the suse
I did actually find the suse build service and various .ymp files to be of great help during my experience with suse, I however didn't feel they were relavant to the point I was trying to get across in my review. Part of it is likely my training with apt and pacman where I can usually search for a package, find it in the repo's, and install it. Where I constantly find packages missing in the suse repos, although for me it's likely due to my somewhat odd taste in applications.
Also, I was impressed with the improvements they made in package managment since I've been gone, zypper is a great improment to what there used to be. However it's searching of the repos is somewhat.....broken. It really should search more than package names, but that's another issue entirely.
Stefan Nuxoll
Oh, and while we're on the
Oh, and while we're on the note of epiphany. While yes, the lastest version of epiphany *IS* included in the repo's, it's still compiled against an old version of Gecko.
Stefan Nuxoll
RPM and zypper on opensuse
zypper and rpm on opensuse are way too slow compared to apt-get and pacman :-(
even rpm on fedora and mandriva is way faster..
RPM is just as fast, it's
RPM is just as fast, it's zypper that's horrendously slow compared to yum, don't remember what Mandriva uses but their package managment was in even worse shape than slackware last time I used it.
Stefan Nuxoll
I use a mixture of Linuxes
I use a mixture of Linuxes daily,
Debian, Ubuntu and Opensuse,Redhat, Sabayon (For fun)
It is quite clear that the choice of distro someone uses is purely subjective. To each his own. I personally over the last 8 years have left Suse only to return to it.
Yast - is a great tool. It is very quick even when I have all my repositories enabled for refreshing. Hence dont understand your comment above about package installation being slow. I have not seen it as yet.
KDE - yes I am a kde users (Sorry). Tried GNOME many times but really dont like it much. I fine Opensuse's kde 4 implementation simply more refined and stable than others I have tried. Hats off to OpenSuse for the job they have done.
To point is no to say one distro is better than another but rather to acknowledge that to each his own. If you find something you love, then stick with it.
I agree with you on the KDE4
I agree with you on the KDE4 bit, if I were to actually use KDE4 for some mysterious reason then openSUSE 11.0 would most definetly be the distro of choice, that or Arch, KDEmod seems to have done KDE4 as well.
As for package installation being slow, it often takes 30 seconds for zypper to start downloading a package, while every other semi-modern distro (read, debian, ubuntu, fedora, arch) will start fetching and installing stuff almost immediately. Obviously these are my experiences, but it's still quite disturbing.
Stefan Nuxoll
I suggest to try zypper in
I suggest to try zypper in more verbose mode (zypper -v or zypper -vv). IMO you are experiencing a slow mirror. The output of those should provide hints what's going on.
The issue wasn't mirror
The issue wasn't mirror speed, but the speed of the zypper cache, at least I'm hoping so since it shouldn't need to ping the mirror to search through package listings.
Stefan Nuxoll
2.5 hours to install? That insanity.
Please check your computer, something may be wrong with it. If not, you've found a serious bug and one that's worth reporting.
Recently I've installed OpenSuse on a variety of hardware ranging from a 800Mhz P3 with 384MB memory, an AMD 2400+ with 512MB memory and other more current machines and none of them have taken so long to do an install. An hour, tops. So our experiences differ greatly, it would be interesting to find out why.
Granted, I've been installing KDE and XFCE not Gnome, but still that is an exorbitant amount of time.
Did you use automatic configuration or did you remove the check box from that box? If you removed it, the updates would have been done prior to booting to the desktop for the first time. If you had a slow inet connection, that could have been the cause of your slow install.
BTW: I have to agree, the switch from QT to GTK is brutal during the install. FWIW I believe it only does that when installing a non KDE environment.
KennV
It only took an hour and a
It only took an hour and a half, part of that was me tweaking my package selection, also, I installed it in a VM so my install time wasn't very accurate. When I did a native install on the same box the install time was closer to an hour.
Stefan Nuxoll
mandriva
been a fan of suse 10.1 went off it after that, decided to use mandrake 10.1 excellent distro had its good a horrible times "2007 never again" , however i am downloading 2009 powerpack right now as i have been happy with 2008.0 and right now on 2008.1 spring , i feel stability is what mandriva have really nipped perfectly in 2008 and i know hope the 2009 release mandriva have come along huge strides in being a reliable ,easy to use all rounder, suse i feel have gone in my view the fedora route of latest unstable but were working on it route not for me
I second the Mandriva option
I tested seven Linux distros a year ago to switch from XP and Mandriva was the only one that behaved well enough to help me ditch the XP habit. I found openSUSE's package management was a complete nightmare. So many conflicting wiki articles on setting up X properly and package dependencies that get you into a real mess.
The best thing about Mandriva is the Control Center that has pretty much everything in it you need to configure anything. With Ubuntu you have to read through so many community docs and their selection of admin GUIs is paltry compared to the Mandriva CC. And given the pain of openSUSE's package management, the only real choice for a KDE user that doesn't like hassle is Mandriva. Plain and simple :-)
Mandriva's package management is done via drakconf (GUI) or urpmi (command-line) and with the help of adding Easy URPMI repositories (thanks to the Penguin Liberation Front), things like flash players and codecs are a breeze: http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/
Package Managment
Mandriva's package managment still fails, and they are still far too tied to KDE for my liking (all of the control center applets still use Qt, if I'm not mistaken). If they switched to Yum I'd have fewer qualms, but after using apt and pacman I'm quite judgmental of package managment.
Stefan Nuxoll
projeksiyon plazma kiralama
projeksiyon
plazma kiralama
Projeksiyon Kiralama
Led ekran Kiralama
Simultane
araba
uluslararası nakliyat
josa
been a fan of suse 10.1 went off it after that, decided to use mandrake 10.1 excellent distro had its good a horrible times "2007 never again" , however i am downloading 2009 powerpack right now as i have been happy with 2008.0 and right now on 2008.1 spring ,Gunz Online Fan web sites! gunz online.Gunz online hacks gunz online hacks Goblin of - in german mythology guide Goblin Of German Mythology Sro isrobot download isrobot download Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning ragnarok online story i feel stability is what mandriva have really nipped perfectly in 2008 and i know hope the 2009 release mandriva have come along huge strides in being a reliable ,easy to use all rounder, suse i feel have gone in my view the fedora route of latest unstable but were working on it route not for me
Post new comment