Arch Linux

SpookyET

Member

Registered: 2008-01-27

Posts: 410

Why I love openSUSE?

openSUSE 11 is shaping quite well. zypper is abnormally fast (rewritten algorithm). I'm looking forward to hear some suse stories.

Maki

Member

From: Skopje, Macedonia

Registered: 2007-10-16

Posts: 353

Website

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

Everytime i download opensuse somethiing messes up, i have burn it improperly, deleted the download ....
I'm downloading 10.3 right for a friend and check it out a little.

Last edited by Maki (2008-04-22 14:02:17)

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jbromley

Member

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2007-02-04

Posts: 268

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

I've used openSUSE 10.2 and 10.3 for a good period of time. For me, it was a solid distro where everything worked and I can understand why Novell's offerings appeal to corporate types. That said, I changed to Arch anyway. Why?

1. It's big. Just after logging in there would be 120 processes running! On the arch system I've got running now, there are about 60 processes at startup and I still have all the functionality I need. Needless to say, all these processes meant things weren't as snappy as they could be.

2. When the GUI configurators works, it's great. But when you need to something that can't be done through the GUI it becomes problematic, because often the GUI tool won't be able to recognize your changes and just nuke them.

3. The package manager was terrible in terms of speed. I'm glad to hear that it's going to be much better.

At one point I was going to build a minimal system using the openSUSE base console install as the base, but I was concerned that dependencies would force me to install much more than I wanted to. Arch was a natural, as I could build exactly the system I wanted and manage configs myself.

Regards,
j

Jessehk

Member

From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2007-01-16

Posts: 152

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

openSUSE is absolutely beautiful looking and probably the most polished/professional. I don't think it has many other merits.

dschauer

Member

Registered: 2008-02-28

Posts: 95

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

I used OpenSUSE 10.3 for a while (after using Ubuntu for many months) and had problems with OpenSUSE's ATI xorg drivers.

http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?showtopic=45188&hl=
http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?showtopic=45184&hl=

I also had a lot of problems with updates. It seemed that every time there were updates, something would not update right due to some dependency or package replaced by something else problem. Other did not seem to be having that problem, so it must have been what I installed and how I set things up. Dunno. I got tired of 10.3 after about a few weeks and then tried Gentoo again, but after using binary distros for a while Gentoo was way too slow. So I decided to give Arch a try and found that it had every thing I liked about Gentoo and Ubuntu, without everything I disliked about each of them.

To me picking and OS or distribution is a matter of pick your poison. They all have serious problems when it comes to serving the user. It is really a matter of what problems you can tolerate the most amiably. OpenSUSE had too much poison that I could not easily put up with.

Last edited by dschauer (2008-04-21 22:12:06)

clarence

Member

From: fremantle.au

Registered: 2005-10-12

Posts: 294

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

i want to love opensuse. it is kinda sexy (dont give me that weird look, you know what i mean...)

it looks like a very good distro for people who would rather not use windows but don't know much about computers.

there is just something about it that makes me not love it.... and i dont know why

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Misfit138

Misfit Emeritus

From: USA

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 4,189

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

openSUSE is absolutely beautiful looking and probably the most polished/professional. I don't think it has many other merits.

I completely agree. Never have I been more overwhelmingly disappointed after having such hopes built up by such a professional looking installer and system layout.
Every time I have installed Suse, I am awed by the breathtaking eye candy..and then you go to use the thing and everything freezes, crashes, panics or hangs.
This is no exaggeration at all. From version 9 onward.
Suse is also the absolutely slowest and least responsive distro I have ever used. It is most disappointing, because it seems so polished, at least superficially- and this happens with each subsequent release.
It seems like they are so close to having something truly terrific every time, and then the whole dev team goes out drinking for 72 hours straight and then releases a beta.

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Maki

Member

From: Skopje, Macedonia

Registered: 2007-10-16

Posts: 353

Website

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

Tried OpenSuse 10.3 yesterday. The installation was all nice (except it wouldn't let me choose both kde & gnome) the transparent panel, suse button, kickoff and the green background are cool and eye-candy.
BUT everything else sucks.
The windeco looks ugly, plastik is soo old and retro, the color scheme doesn't match the background, and the icons are looking outdated. The selection of packages in the dvd also sucks, seems like they just put what will fit on the dvd, and didn't care about consistency between the DE and apps. Package management is slow and YAST isn't so usable ( could be better if it would follow kde/gnome HIG)
other stuff like suse build service, klick,ymp are just great

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If it ain't broke, broke it then fix it.

sH

Member

From: Braunschweig, Germany

Registered: 2007-05-02

Posts: 145

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

I especially like Geeko and I'm a bit disappointed that we archers could not have such a cool avatar. But for me SusE as a GNOME user was just not usable. Feels heavy, slow and the package manager is shamefully bad. I had so many problems with unresolved dependencies.

Also Yast, Suse sysconfig and especially Sax is pure evil in my opinion. It's so easy to mess up your system completely when the installer could not set up your configuration properly and you try to fix it yourself.

FeatherMonkey

Member

Registered: 2007-02-26

Posts: 313

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

I have to say it keeps getting better and better, with each release, I'm a fan.

Do agree somethings could be better, DE and apps I agree there isn't a clear divide, and some pattern groups are a little strange, certainly base can be iirc, i.e bits of networking tools missing, and x installed. But they do seem to listen and keep improving for a while many seemed to find the deps to big on Base, and they keep working on zypper also heard its very good in 11.

Do think if you start looking out of the main repos a lot of problems start occurring. Also find some of those dep msg's a bit strange sometimes. When you actually read them you just have to ignore them because its installing a newer version any way, but as a new user the last thing on your mind.

As someone said above is sort of horses for courses, when it all works not sure it can be bettered from an out of the box experience no prop point of view, and KDE from it is sublime.

Which then leads onto don't think anyone can knock what they do put back into the community.

But arch won me over in the end still have Suse around, I am looking forward to 11 looks like it should be a good one.

Misfit138

Misfit Emeritus

From: USA

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 4,189

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

I always look forward to Suse releases, with guarded enthusiasm. I am always hoping that "this will be the one they get right". So far, at least for me, all releases have been visually pleasing but very low-quality, slow, and give unexpected behavior, for which I have no patience.
Arch and Slackware may be completely bland and vanilla out of the box, with ncurses installers, but they work superbly.

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FeatherMonkey

Member

Registered: 2007-02-26

Posts: 313

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

Think slow can sometimes be down to the bloat ware, like beagle and the update tool.

But do sort of know what you mean, I do recall trying to time how long it took me to su once.

Do still think as someone said above. Its sort of what you're prepared to put up with. For some they wouldn't use Arch for lack of keysigning etc.. for others they won't use suse because it feels slow. Can't say I ever had unexpected behavior, but then I've always been careful on repos and accepted for newer things Arch just rocks.

Last edited by FeatherMonkey (2008-04-22 14:26:58)

bgc1954

Member

From: Edmonton, AB, Canada

Registered: 2006-03-14

Posts: 1,160

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

Been there done that, last try was Suse 11 Alpha 1.  Still can't stand Yast--too slow for me, hard to find good repos, especially for multimedia.  Tried ftp installation once or twice when I was really bored--first to find a decent mirror (good luck), then it took hours to install and hours more to fix all the issues after the install.  After it's all installed, it looks good but as others have said, I'd rather have something that's not so flashy and just works.

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finferflu

Forum Fellow

From: Manchester, UK

Registered: 2007-06-21

Posts: 1,899

Website

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

I have tried version 10.2, and I was quite disappointed by the uber-slowness (and keep that thing called YAST away from me). Also, as it has been mentioned by Misfit, there were lots of hangups and apps not responding... disappointing indeed...
I cannot go farther than this, since I have tried it for about half an hour after installing it, since it was for a friend. I never thought of going back to it. There is a reason why I try to avoid Windows at all costs, apart from my personal ethical reasons, and that is the interface. OpenSuse seems to be inspired by it.

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yesterday

Member

Registered: 2008-04-23

Posts: 7

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

I have mixed feelings about openSUSE, mostly due to Novell.  Their distros are often extremely well presented, with a lot of polish and shine, however I have had weird config issues with some older versions.  I also feel that Yast in the past was a bit slow compared to the competition.  However, the biggest problem for me is that they did a deal with the devil so to speak.  The MS patent "protection" issue is a bit of a slap in the face for Linux devotees, so I am torn between my admiration for the polish of the distro, and my disappointment about the ideology driving the distro.

tlaloc

Member

From: Lower Saxony

Registered: 2006-05-12

Posts: 359

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

I used Suse from 9.1 to 10.0 - it was excellent for beginners. Even this bloody thing called YaST taught me some things about package management, which I didn't knew before. (Obviously, I didn't knew anything about package management before encountering YaST, but that's the point - excellent for beginners.)

Too slow for you nowadays? I would agree. But please keep in mind that Arch and Suse are intended for totally different users - it is like comparing a Porsche to a family-van. Both have their strong and bad points, depending on how/for which reason you use them.

b9anders

Member

Registered: 2007-11-07

Posts: 691

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

I tried 10.3 and liked it for a time. yast is a great tool and it's definitely the most polished distro out there (at least when it comes to kde). one-click-install is great. They bring a lot of innovation to the linux community so it's always a distro worth watching.

That said, there were too many minor glitches and package management was just too slow to bear, despite it supposedly being faster than before in 10.3 (again). Quite some way to go before it can match apt or pacman.

It's a distro that leaves you thinking 'this could be the best!' but ultimately fails to deliver.

SpookyET

Member

Registered: 2008-01-27

Posts: 410

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

Fast zypper video http://duncan.mac-vicar.com/blog/archives/296

Redroar

Member

Registered: 2008-03-17

Posts: 200

Re: Why I love openSUSE?

Yeah, Zypper can go pretty quick. Still, nowhere near as fast as pacman, but easily comparable with YUM, etc. It's just the Yast package manager that takes an eternity...

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