OpenSUSE 11.0 — The Long and Short of it
I haven’t been using my blog much over the ast few months. I have generally been very busy with life in general. Not least of course with work which has been a great player in my life this year. Not in a negative overtaking way but apart from my photography and walking, it has been my main creative output. So, trying to get things back on an even base before I leave once again for a weeks (for Christmas and New Year) it’s about time I updated this blog on my exploits with OpenSUSE 11.0.
OpenSUSE 11.0 Desktop with Firefox 3 and LyX
I think about 3-4 months ago I decided to give the distribution a go to see how it was compared to Ubuntu (which I was getting somewhat disenchanted by with its somewhat sloppy approach to testing it seemed, and the general default aesthetic looking like arse — don’t get me wrong I know it can be changed but first 8.04 was meant to be featuring a new theme, then 8.10 and I can’t see any real difference… Way to go! Especially with so may talented theme makers throwing their ideas into the pot.)
The only thing I have changed since switching to OpenSUSE 11.0 is not the distribution, but I have dropped KDE 4.1 for Gnome. I think KDE has come a long way but to make the most of it, it does need something a little more juicy than a Radeon 7500 (which is what my ThinkPad T40 has, and that chip was out of date when it was put in this notebook in 2003, and yes — I still have the T40 and no I don’t need a new laptop.)
The main thing that I like about OpenSUSE is the way it really does just work. I have had no problems with media, video, general office applications, networking (wired and wireless), sharing files with Windows/Mac OS X… It all just works. Granted on almost 6 year old hardware, the compatibility should be pretty good now 
With Compiz, the equivalent of Vista's Aero, you can get snazzy desktop effects. The difference is they run, and quite well at that, on very modest hardware like an ancient Raden 7500 Mobility GPU!
So where does this leave me in the future? Well in 4 days I understand OpenSuse 11.1 is released and I shall upgrade to that as well. But the bottom line really does seem to be that as an OS, it works so very well. And if you have a fairly well established system (i.e. not bleeding edge) — I cannot see why unless you have to connect to a Windows managed domain and you need specific applications which only exist on Windows — OpenSuse is just about great for everybody. Even complete novices.
Note: Yes I have skinned my OpenSUSE system to look somewhat like Vista with OS X’s Leopard default background. I like it like this, it works well, aesthetically pleasing and it looks quite professional, which quite a lot of themes for Linux[1] don’t.
[1] : I’m well aware that Linux is a bad turn of phrase here with there being KDE, GTK, Metacity etc. etc. themes but for simplicities sake, this makes sense.
Good luck with OS 11.1! It was a profoundly disappointing experience for me as it could not find a wireless netwwork if it was sitting right beside one. Even manually configuring it was a dead loss as it refused to connect. The LiveCD could see and connect to a wireless network but during install it played dumb. The expensive DVD was no better as it could not instal from within Vista as it was said to be able to do and it flopped bigtime during install from boot – again unable to recognize wirelss. And if you are thinking of getting into OSUSE because it is backed by Novell and you are told there is a tech support line, forget it! That is unless you want to talk to people in Germany at 4 AM who man the line and do not speak the best English. My suggestion is if you got lucky with oopenSUSE you really got lucky, but please don’t sell it to others as the easy and relaible Linux distro because it surely is not. Try the ‘buntu family or Fedora or LinuMint as they are much better suited to modern machines and they don’t have the backing of Novell – and as Martha Stewart says “…and that’s a GOOD thing!
JJCB in the Frozen North where We Stand On Guard For Thee.
JJCB
March 17, 2009 at 9:58 pm