SuSE - Burger King Style!
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It’s been difficult to really get too excited about SuSE in recent years. But to be fair, I have not had time to try version 11.1, which I hear has been rated as significantly better with regards to NOT providing borked updates. And believe me, as a Linux user, I see this as a good thing.
Now take this SuSE builder that provides you with ala cart options for building your own ISO! Despite not being able to select other distros from the menu, it is nice to have the option to build up a SuSE distribution of Linux that provides you with the desktop, scripts and other goodies as you see fit rather than some developers some place.
Would this translate into myself going back to SuSE? I find it unlikely, but then again, I once said the same thing about Ubuntu. So anything is possible.
3 Comments
Len Cleavelin
April 9th, 2009
at 7:31am
Dunno. I’ve been using OpenSUSE for t least two, three years now, and I’m perfectly satisfied. Haven’t moved to 11.1 yet, but it’s on the agenda.
Nick Jennings
April 10th, 2009
at 4:43am
I hadn’t checked out SuSE since the mid 90’s until just a few weeks ago, and I must say v11.1 is really amazing. I also have not been a KDE fan this entire time, preferring GNOME, or fluxbox, or even XCFE (and when I’m in the mood for change, ion, enlightenment, or anything else that seems interesting).
I had been a long time Debian users, which got me really into Ubuntu, of course. Used it for many years, though after several issues with support for the wifi card on my newest laptop, and my efforts to fix it being broken after any system updates, I grew weary of Ubuntu and decided to try something with newer drivers. I was happy with Madrake for the past 6 months, all my hardware worked, etc, but I was never totally satisfied with it. I have no specific issues with it other than it just didn’t seem to have any concise focus (whatever that means).
I heard a lot about how the openSUSE distro provided the best x86_64 support (they apparently spearheaded the development) and also provide the best KDE system out of all the distros (its often used as the distro of choice for KDE reviews). I had pretty much made up my mind to switch from Mandrake, and figured after 10+years I’d give SuSE another try - while I was at it, why not check out KDE4 and see what the future holds.
It’s absolutely great! I’ve updated to the “bleeding edge” KDE4.2.2 and it’s really lovely. My wifi card was not supported out of the box, but adding the madwifi.org repository took care of the problem. KDE4 is not perfect, still buggy, but I like it much more than I thought I would and am willing to bug up with the imperfectness of it just to be able to enjoy the eye pleasing interface. As for the Linux system itself, it seems to be very well put together, I like YaST (though I was expecting to hate it), feel as if the base distro is solid, while providing tons of optional packages. I often have a much better sense of trust in an underlying system that is put together by the same folks who have a trusted, hardened, server product as well. I feel this way about SuSE, Redhat, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, etc. Of those, I think SuSE is the only one who can compete on the desktop spectrum as well. (I’ve never run Ubuntu server, so I just can’t comment on that, but I’m sure it’s fine).
I’m going to give it some time before I can say for sure, but I think I may be an openSUSE convert - which is an odd thing to “hear” coming out of my mouth.
Nick Jennings
April 10th, 2009
at 4:55am
Oh, and I forgot to give props to the old 90’s SuSE Linux installer that let you play tetris as it installed itself onto your system (which could take a couple hours). :)