I had been a distro hopper for a while. I never quite found a Linux that got it all right. I also have preferred KDE for a desktop environment. I know there are a bunch of low resource environments. But I have a very powerful computer, so the KDE overhead is irrelevant. KDE 4.8 finally got to where it should have been the whole time. Since what I do with my computer is very involved with business, I also did not want to try some of the lesser known distros. Mint Linux has always been pretty solid, but their implementation of KDE always appeared to be an afterthought. Kubuntu was okay, but I didn't like it as much as Mint. Any of the other distros with KDE were either too obscure or not well polished. It was a tough decision a while back to choose Mint 13 and 14 KDE 64 bit over OpenSuse 12.1 and 12.2. Let me just say Ubuntu is weird. Forget that distro. They've decided to go their own way and throw everybody else under the bus. Yep, I also liked Debian, but that thing took hours and hours to configure properly to my liking. Windows 8 is a disaster in the making too. I would endure a root canal before switching to that. I tried the developers preview. What the heck is Microsoft thinking? This is going to make the Vista disaster look like a sunny afternoon. I actually ran Mandriva for years before they went into a meltdown.

I have an HP XW8600 Workstation with dual quad core 3Ghz Xeons, 32G of DRAM and an Nvidia GT520 card with 1G of RAM. I hardly need a light DE like XFCE, LXDE, Mate or etc. Gnome is okay, but not as pretty or evolved as KDE. Clunkier too.

Then I installed OpenSuse 12.3 64-bit with KDE 4.10.1 on my system on a spare drive to take a look. Wow. Not only is it the most polished execution of KDE, it is just rock solid, fast and has some great support. I think this is the best distro of Linux ever. This thing looks so good, is so easily configurable and is just a pleasure to work with. I installed lots of extra stuff. I got the 3D OpenGL desktop effects working great. I installed lots of graphics software familiar to us all. I also have to say something about all the Ubuntu based distros. None of them has a decent HTML editor anymore. Seriously!!! You have to do back-flips to install Seamonkey, Kompozer or Bluegriffon in the Ubuntu variants. But OpenSuse has Bluegriffon and Seamonkey right there in the repos! I also installed Virtualbox. I already had a vbox appliance with WinXPP in it. So I just imported it from my previous Mint 14 install and made a pretty icon for it. You can see the icon on my desktop. All in all, this operating system is just beautiful. Heck, I think Apple should toss OSX and use this instead. You can see a snapshot of my desktop here:

http://www.pacificmicrotel.com/files/snapshot.png

There's actually a place for reviews:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/reviews/index.php/cat/2
although they haven't listed OpenSUSE 12.3 yet (it usually takes wstewart a few days). When it's done, ask a kind moderator to move your review there so that it gets the attention it deserves. Or just copy it youself.

I always say that you need to use a distro with it's default GUI (don't try SUSE with Xfce!) and if I were asked for a KDE distro, I'd say SUSE ranks pretty high. They say there's a distro for everyone: nice to see you've found yours!

1 members found this post helpful.

I have been impressed with OpenSuse for a long while more for the server support. Now I like it for Desktop support. It is a very good choice.


Did you use Btrfs?

I used to be a big fan of OpenSuse, but I've always found them to be buggy since the version 11 series. They also have one of the ugliest default color schemes of any Linux, including their splash screens. I think their developers are color blind. You may think Ubuntu is weird, but they put a lot more thought into how the system looks, and it shows. You're just wrong about Windows 8. For one thing, the developer preview is nothing like the finished product. And based on my experience, 8 is the most responsive, stable system they've come up with yet. I have no complaints about it. If you use it like a desktop, it works like a desktop. If you want to use it on a table, it works like a tablet. I don't think there's any other system around that can do that.

yes, opensuse is a nice system, but don't support other than US Keyboard Layout with full disk encryption, so its useless when you need this, but do not want US Keyboard Layout, and this is not unusual in companies.

The 64-bit version may be fine, but the 32-bit one is a disaster zone this time round.

The live disk failed because graphics couldn't start: not a missing video driver, but a segmentation fault.

The full disk installed, but the system re-booted into a CLI: graphics had not been correctly configured and I had to alter the boot parameters in grub. At the next boot, I found that no user had been created, so I had to do that manually. Third time unlucky: no internet and the GUI tool to configure it was dead.

The SUSE rules seem to be: only use with KDE, 64-bit CPU, and a modern graphics chip.

Originally being a Slackware guy, i have been running openSUSE for a while now.

openSUSE 11.4 is quite good!
Installs easily on every piece of hardware that i could find, and proves to be powerful for desktop use and for gaming, as well as for server use. Installing and configuring of different setups is quite doable if you have some knowledge of what you want to setup.

Then version 12 came along, and i have tried several times to install openSUSE 12.1 and 12.2 on different hardware. But none of the hardware i've got at hand could successfully have openSUSE 12.x installed. The closest i came was installing a x86_64 12.1 in a vmware client on a Slamd64 x86_64 host. That install lived some minutes after boot before failing severely in one way or another.
This left me quite baffled!?

Now, with openSUSE 12.3 released, i have been successful in installing it on a few different hardwares. But none of them will install without some more or less advanced tweaking. Like specifying "nomodeset" and other kernel boot options that should not be needed for a "vanilla" install on a well known hardware.

Funny stuff happen when going from 11.4 to 12.3: I have some SUN Fire X2200 M2 blade servers running 11.4 without a hitch. I have managed to get 12.3 working on them by simply installing with the "nomodeset" kernel parameter. But one interesting difference from 11.4 is that cpufreq (powernow-k8) does not work in 12.3 but did work with 11.4. Why?
Evolution should only make things better. But openSUSE 12 is showing a state of increased deterioration instead.

In paralell to installs of openSUSE 12.3 i have on the same hardwares installed centos (redhat), slackware, ubuntu etc, and also tried different live linux systems with great success.
But openSUSE seems to suffer enourmously from incompatibilities and install glitches.

The latest yawdropper is that openSUSE, implementing systemd, (to replace SysV runlevels), sometimes give an install where services randomly does not start. I have googled a bit on this, and it seems others are being affected by this issue too, but i have not yet found a definite solution to the issue.

Maybe this is a bit of flamebait. I'm sorry then. But i think i must atleast share the experience.
If nothing is done to improve stability and compatibility in openSUSE it is destined to die.
Would anyone want that??

I can also mention the Akonadi and Nepomuk: Who wanted that? And when is it going to be completely purged from KDE, so that we can all use KDE again?

Wow!

Installed KIWI on a machine with openSUSE 12.3 installed and freshly updated. And Yast insisted i must reboot immediately "to use the new kernel". What?!?

Rebooted, and got stuck since the grub2 boot has been modified to use a new kernel (which i didn't ask for) and which was not loaded.
Probably because it simply isn't installed at all?

Amazing!

Did a rescue boot to the kernel that is installed on the system, just to find out everything with grub2 boot, services and X are all minced up.

I've installed KIWI before, but not with this result.

Now it is back to the image backup again for another round. Starting to get annoyed by the 12.3 that seem to totally lack the slightest reliability.


It's starting to look like openSUSE since version 12 has become the first choice linux distribution for those who want to test out all new fantastic alpha release, nonstandard, flashy functionality that never work, and finding new bugs in places there used not to be any bugs, instead of using the computer to do something fruitful.

Anyone got a recommendation for a linux distributiuon that is robust, and does not come with nepomuk, akonadi, systemd without runlevels and with sporadic service startup, broken acpi modules, modesetting drivers that never work, and all that other fluffy stuff that simply don't work and i never wanted in the system.

this was post on the Opensuse forums too. I'm knightron there too. I don't participate there much because the forum is a little slow and annoys me. I much prefer the LQ forums over all the Linux forums i've participated on.
Lets get a couple things in order. You appear like a noob to me, and i'm no expert on Unix like operating systems either. I've been using Gnu/Linux for about a year and a half.
This is probably the most controversial statement in your review. Mepis is a very good kde distro, and was quite popular, a few years ago, and still maintains a very helpful community, not just for support, but also updated packages. Being based off Debian stable, and not Ubuntu or Debian sid, i consider Mepis to be one of the best kde distros.
[QUOTE]Yep, I also liked Debian, but that thing took hours and hours to configure properly to my liking.[QUOTE]
... Seriously? come on! Debian is not hard to install anymore, and configuring is just as easy as on Opensusue/Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora.
I personally have not tried 12.3 yet, but really like Opensuse. It is tied as my favorite distro, and if they still supported system V, i'd perhaps stay permanent on evergreen. In my opinion, Grub2 is a mistake too, on 12.2 my system wouldn't boot and i had to edit the config file from a different distro to get it to work. But at least Grub legacy is still supported. As for your interview, it's not particularly to my liking, but i'm glad to hear you're enjoying Opensuse; it really is a top distro.
You're desktop is a little boring; i like that

@wroom
In my opinion, 11.4 is one of Opensuses best releases. 12.1 was far lower on the scale. 12.2 has been very nice for me, and i've heard good stuff about 12.3 from a few places. Opensuse does not support version skipping in upgrades, fyi. Runlevels are also present in Opensuse. I heard Ubuntu doesn't use them though, are you sure you haven't confused the two here.
As for nepomuk and akonadi, i'm not a fan either. But since you're originally a Slackware guy, how can you complain they come with the system when Slackware's no different, in fact Slackware's probably worse in that compartment. The packages are just as easily marked for no install anyways.

I fully agree with that.
If you ask me, best roadmap for openSUSE is to ditch 12.x right now and restart development from 11.4 with all the experience from what went wrong with v12.
If it wasn't for the dropped updates and all the deleted extra repos for 11.4 i'd continue using it, and never again look at version 12.

The bad thing is that i am correct. Now, with 12.3 we have systemd with "said to be" support for runlevels. The fact is it does not have runlevels. And systemd in 12.3 is doing a lousy job in keeping the correct services alive.
The Yast2 runlevel editor is disfunctional. Try it out. If you are not one of the lucky few then you will see that enabling a service with the runlevel editor sometimes give you an enabled service, and sometimes it will never ever enable a service for you, although it claims to have enabled it. I don't have time and interest in debugging systemd, and want the old SysV runlevels back working.
There's so many developers that think they are improving, where they actually should have stayed away and leave something stable and working be. Software quality comes first.

You got me there. As long as one uses KDE4, be it Slack or SUSE, you're stuck with fighting off the Nepomuk and Akonadi goonies.

Disabling them should not be an issue. If you wanted that crap you should have to manually enable it from the first place.
Instead of having to manually hack their presence out of the system after every major release.

Who really needs Nepomuk and Akonadi? Really???

And, to who's benefit is it that linux today seems to be "developed to death"?

Found a very interesting discussion about the broken handling of services in openSUSE 12.3 YAST2:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=800514

It clearly shows how severe the issue with runlevels/systemd is.

People are frustrated over systemd replacing SysV runlevels. And those responsible dont seems to care much that the YAST module "System Services (Runlevel)" is broken by the change to systemd, despite being warned about it in good time before release of 12.3.

Maybe openSUSE, as well as SUSE Enterprise, is going into the darkness, just as SUN did?

Me too. 11.4 was a workhorse release and it rarely let me down.

Here's another one thats new with openSUSE 12.3 which where not there in 11.4:

Installed dhcp server with the yast module. After configured the dhcp server and ending the yast dialog, network manager comes in and makes minced meat of the /etc/named.conf file without even asking or telling. Very interesting, since i use traditional method for setting up the network and don't use network manager at all. And network manager is not even enabled nor started as a service (confirmed).

I guess i need to keep a mirror catalog for the system configuration, like /etc , so i can check that nothing is being destroyed in the background when using yast?

Setting up an openSUSE 12.3 system is more and more looking to be futile work.

True, some bugs. Some kind of big.

The rating thread is created. Here: ==> http://www.linuxquestions.org/review...p?product=2549