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I'm trying OpenSUSE 11.2/KDE4.3.3 at the moment and I have to admit it's pretty good.
Bwahahaha...welcome to the green side. Yeh I have been using it too, it's awesome. Specially the firefox-kde integration and the openoffice looks. And I find it quite stable. Last year I tried 11.0 and I had lotsa problems with it, yast was slow and KDE4.1 was buggy, but all is fixed now. Great work by suse team.
I stopped using Suse at version 10.1 because YAST was horribly broken. Has the package-management improved with 11.2?
***posting from my company work station***
Well it sure has. Not just yast , I had problems with stability too. I mean being a slacker stability is just something you get used to and you expect stuff to work, but with KDE4.1 things would crash every 5 seconds. It's all fixed now.
[...]
Out of the box, font rendering was ugly as sin, but I found that by changing everything to Deja Vu Sans/Serif and playing with the subpixel rendering settings I managed to get something that looks acceptable.
I haven't tried 11.2, so far, but I had the very same problem with previous versions. The biggest problem was with the GUI of OpenOffice.org (not the fonts in the documents, but in the menus).
Quote:
Originally Posted by GazL
Multimedia playback is very limited out of the box. I've read some stuff on adding support for the common codecs from 3rd party repositories but I'm yet to figure out which are trustworthy, so I'll leave that for a while.
[...]
Though the "hands-off the config files!" nature of OpenSUSE is providing some degree of culture-shock to this long time Slacker, I have to admit Novell have come up with something rather nice here. I simply don't dislike it the way I do Ubuntu.
I think I'll run this a bit longer and see how it goes.
Totally different philosophy than Slackware, but I like it too. And with 11.2, it seems, they are finally back to what the distro once made so popular.
Well it sure has. Not just yast , I had problems with stability too. I mean being a slacker stability is just something you get used to and you expect stuff to work, but with KDE4.1 things would crash every 5 seconds. It's all fixed now.
Stability issues in the desktop: yes, I had this, too. On servers, SuSE has never let me down.
Thanks for the link. I was aware of the packman repos. However, what worries me is that it looks like just another linuxpackages.net type of setup. I couldn't see any mention of whether they put their packages through any sort of peer review before making them available to the public. Yes, the packages are signed, but what degree of scrutiny do they get before they're signed?
This is one of the reasons I like slackbuilds.org - the build scripts are easily readable and use pristine sources. Plus, the fact that the project is run by people of a very solid reputation and with close ties to the distro counts for a lot with me.
Perhaps I'm just being overly paranoid here though.
Thanks for the link. I was aware of the packman repos. However, what worries me is that it looks like just another linuxpackages.net type of setup. I couldn't see any mention of whether they put their packages through any sort of peer review before making them available to the public. Yes, the packages are signed, but what degree of scrutiny do they get before they're signed?
Frankly, I don't know. All I can say is, that you should find most of the stuff for multimedia support there, and that their packages never failed for me. It used to be (and probably still is) the most popular 3rd-party source of software.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GazL
This is one of the reasons I like slackbuilds.org - the build scripts are easily readable and use pristine sources. Plus, the fact that the project is run by people of a very solid reputation and with close ties to the distro counts for a lot with me [...].
I had OpenSUSE on my spare box for a short time checking it out for the g/f.
I can't comment on it from a tech viewpoint but I can say the package management was fairly fast.
Unless you go into YAST and untick the selection to search for the install disc it will ask for it every-time you try to install something.
There may be more packages available than the average person realizes that are prebuilt and ready to install for OpenSUSE.
They have several repo's you have to enter into the package manager and it can be done auto magically.
This includes a user's repo similar to Arch's AUR.
There are also several packages that are one click install similar to the MS way.
You don't download these packages, you browse to them in your browser and click the link; the package manager does the rest.
I myself don't care for the trend of only having one password that fits everything, which OpenSUSE also has, but that can be changed.
IMHO, it's a distro worthy of consideration.
Slack however is still simpler.
It kind of reminded me of Debian or Arch in a way as my being unfamiliar with it, I had to go to several different locations to find the answer on how-to.
I however did always find the answer on how-to and it was easy enough that it wasn't necessary to register at the forum and ask.
OpenSUSE is nice, but I felt like I was giving away control so Slack still remains my favorite blanky tyvm.
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Yeh I have been using it too, it's awesome. Specially the firefox-kde integration and the openoffice looks. And I find it quite stable. Last year I tried 11.0 and I had lotsa problems with it, yast was slow and KDE4.1 was buggy, but all is fixed now. Great work by suse team.
