I am interested in opinions of SUSE 11.1 (64bit). I have 11.0 (64 bit) and dislike it.

Man, I haven't even glanced at SuSE since Novell got chummy with M$. I dumped SuSE for Debian and never looked back. Probably not the kind of feedback you were looking for but my two cents anyway FWIW.

Lola Kews,
opensuse 11.1 is a really nice distro if you need to work with windows machines. Especially openoffice has good support for ms office files(thanks novell).

Its a little slow (same as older versions) even if you have a supercomputer, its a little unresponsive.

other unimportant stuff:
its gnome integration sucks,
the software repositories are umm... not too impressive,
as TuxSurfer mentioned, m$ caused the opensuse userbase to shrink!

Its strengths:
yast control center,
great KDE integration,
prettiest linux distribution! (in my opinion).
The installation DVD includes both KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.1

Just an advice, if you are going to install linux on a production machine, forget opensuse! Go with SLED instead.

I've used SuSE for years - as well as all the other major distros.

It's entirely subjective. And since you don't indicate why you don't like 11.0, it's not possible to comment on whether what you disliked has been changed or not.

The main difference in 11.1 is KDE 4.1.3, which is considerably more stable and fills in some of the feature gaps in 4.0 which came with 11.0 (and was advised for only advanced users). But actually, 11.0 can be upgraded to 4.1.3 and even 4.2. 11.1 also is upgradeable to 4.2.

Most of the other changes are under the hood, i.e., newer kernel, some tweaking of a few YaST modules, etc. (and, IMHO, the zypper pkg mgmt back-end is now every bit as good as Debian's apt, and the YaST front-end is considerably more powerful than Synaptic).

So bottom line, unless you're looking for improvements in KDE then 11.1 doesn't offer a whole lot more for the typical end-user.

I disagree with some of the things the r1d3r posted:

openSUSE has customized their version of Gnome so it's different than other distros. I'm not a Gnome user myself, but I haven't heard many complaints about openSUSE's version.

The repositories offered via YaST have tons of software. I'm not sure why r1d3r is saying their 'not too impressive'

And finally, I have openSUSE 11.1 installed on my 'production machine', both 32 bit and 64 bit, and it's working fine.

The official repositories have only 6400 binary packages!
Its not nice for new users to add some other 3rd party repos to get what they need! (and not included in the official ones )


And Those are just an opinion just like the thread requested dont get them seriously.

Firstly, I' have used SuSE/OpenSuSE for years and 11.1 has been my worst install ever (ie, it had the most niggly things wrong that needed manual fixes). However, this was the first time for years that I upgraded an existing install rather than doing a clean install, and I think it was that (but don't know) rather than 11.1 itself that was the cause; I think my next will be a clean install.

Back at, say, 10.3, defining multiple repos was a bit of a pain because yast fussed about a bit and was generally clunky when it came to checking for updates. As of 11.0 (?)/11.1 this is now gone, and you can include lots of repos without it being a serious problem. And when you consider the number of packages available from the SuSE build service (one click install), I would say that one of the advantages of SuSE is its superiority in terms of package availability to all except the other 'big three' (and big isn't necessarily beautiful) distros. And its certainly better than RH was last time I looked, but that was far too long ago to be meaningful.

Not a gnome user myself (well, not voluntarily) but SuSE's addition of the 'search' facility to the menus of KDE and Gnome seems to me to be vital (well, if you install the larger proportion of the packages available from he repos, anyway ) and I'm surprised that other distros don't make that obvious improvement available in their versions; SuSE open sourced it, I think?

Don't yet like KDE 4, but 3.x is still available; I think KDE 4.3 will be good, though, and I'm looking forward to that. (And I'm using enlightenment at least part time now; my 'bad install' still has issues that need sorting...maybe 11.2??)

Not too impressed. Lots of problems with repos, and really slow. But I was running it as a VirtualBox guest under XP (work laptop).
It is no more - the space it was occupying got put to better use.

I had a similar problem with the wifes laptop. It has 1 gig of memory but the problem came when I added the option wireless modem. I did away with Virtual and now back to the old dual boot. Everything works now but agree it is easy to get hung up in the new distros and their candy, but they are getting heavier and using more memory all the time.

Its funny that you say this. I remember SUSE being criticised for including too much software (back in the 7.x days, it was one of only a few distros that came on 7 compact discs or a dvd). As for third party repos, the only ones I use are packman and guru for multimedia codecs. You can get thousands of official packages from the build service.

I am using openSUSE 11.1 64 bit.AMD 3800 dual core. 4G RAM. 2 Nvidia 7300 video cards in SLi.

I generally like openSUSE, and have moved to it from Mandriva. I have used more than a dozen distros, and have found little idiosyncrasies with each and every one of them.

KDE4 works in 11.1. YAST works quickly as well. As far as adding repositories to get the software one wishes, I have never seen that as a "problem." Not being able to get some package is a problem.

The problems I had were very specific. I have an SLi box with Nvidia cards. Where 10.3 worked quite well from that angle, 11.1 was a bit of a nightmare until I found the work-around. (I posted the issue on my blog here.) Next, I use VirtualBox for Windows XP, Windows 7 beta, and other linux distros. I switched from the distro package to xVM VirtualBox on the Sun site. This resolved every odd issue I experienced.

All in all, openSUSE is an easy and pleasant distro to use. I even got Compiz and Emerald working again, which I prefer to the KDE4 gizmos. Not that KDE4 is bad, it is quite good, but I like Compiz/Emerald.

I love it.

It does everything I need a computer to do, it does it fast and extremely well.

I haven't come across a problem finding software, in fact I haven't found another distribution with as much software available.

For people who say its bad because when they run it inside windows.............. well what would you expect.

Putting a Ferrari on top of a Ford Pinto and expecting the Pinto to carry the Ferrari at a reasonable speed is a bit like having an old woman carry a sprinter piggyback in a race thinking they might win.

Hello,
I have used Suse from 7.0 onwards, along with Debian, Slackware, and Ubuntu. I find them all fairly similar really but I like Opensuse. 11.1 was very easy to install on my machines. I haven't found the need for any repos that cannot be easily added from the Yast community list. People should remember the Opensuse build service which can one-click install many programs. Installing software/updates is much better (faster) since 11.0, something that was very annoying in 10.3.

I think as with anything else I like it because I know how it works, I no how to get the right version of Java working to do my job, how to install the nvidia drivers without issue etc etc. Thats the main thing for me, stick to what you know.

Phil

The new release even offers kde 4.2. As if that would make the system more reliable. Actually it didn't even start on machine after install. I had to replace the kernel because it lacked ide support. Can you believe this? It's not in the kernel anymore. I'll stick with Slackware and skip experimenting. Other distros just seem to be a waste of time.

A true bleliever

Sean

OpenSUSE 11.1 is the first release since 10.0 that I have really liked. I am using KDE and cannot comment on the GNOME implementation. Like other openSUSE releases, it (the installer that is) handles setting up wireless better than any other distro I have tried, and I have tried a lot of them. Anyway, as mingus725 stated, it is hard to know if you will like 11.1 if you did not like 11.0, but it was an improvement for some of us.