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OpenSuse 11 Beta1


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Hello everyone,

 

Have you all heard the news, Beta 1 for OpenSuse is out! Woot. Anyway, have y'all seen the screenshots posted? http://en.opensuse.org/Screenshots/openSUSE_11.0_Beta1 I don't know about you guys, but damn does it look stunning. Do you think Mandriva could out do them with 2009? With respect to the Mandriva Dev Team, functionality is the most important part to any distro, and they seem to have that down. But as far as the look and feel, well I personally feel/think that they are lacking just a tad, but still great in the end. I was looking at their(Suse) Media layout page, found here http://en.opensuse.org/Media_Layout/11.0 and noticed they've got a KDE4 LIVE CD. What do you guys think about Suse 11? Has anyone here tried it, if so, how does it compare to Mandy?

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I tried the last stable (10.3?) but quickly went back to mandriva, suse's desktop looks really slick but their tools all take ages to load, the packagemanager is slow as hell and no support for ndiswrapper and I do really like the new mdv spring desktop changing colours....

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My last experience with a SuSE was at my media center, some six months ago, where I tested Jacklab 1.0 (I had xrun issues with the low latency unofficial Arch kernels, and decided to give it a spin for a change).

While the xruns were rare with normal load (this is with non-official SuSE kernels), the overall performance with both included desktops (KDE and E17) was annoyingly sluggish. I could not stand it for a long time...

That said, SuSE was my introduction to the Linux world, eleven years ago, and it's the only distro that I've purchased once (SuSE 7.3 Professional).

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  • 3 weeks later...

ABout once a year I try SUSE (I get invites from NOVELL to some of their conferences so I get SLES)

 

and there are a LOT of things to love about it.

 

For example they had XEN down COLD 2 years ago.

 

And in a multi server environment it was the BEST.

 

but for the lowly desktop user, I think they miss the mark.

 

I havent seen 11, I just burned 10.3 and havent decded as to whetehr to put it on my test pc.....

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi. I am on here as a result of installing suse 10.3 86_64bit. I've used suse since 9.3 and have up to now been very pleased with it. All sorts of problems with this version. It's miss mash of kde 3.5.7 and some kde 4 thrown in for luck - none of which works. The desktop parts can be de activated - fortunately. All 10.3 versions seem to have to have even had an auto updater problem that hasn't been fixed for a long long time. Easily fixed if any one wants to try suse by manually updating with yast. That does get an updater eventually and then all is ok. Software even for video is something of a problem on the 86_64bit version. Yast doesn't offer a facility for forcing 32bit software to be installed. So if for instance one wants khexedit one gets kde4 64bit khexedit which disappears into outer space when the window is scrolled to the end of a file.

 

I had toyed with the idea of waiting for suse 11 but I'm not convinced that I will get a reliable desktop even with kde stable. As to kde4 reliable advice suggests waiting for 4.1 final or even 4.1.1 which should be about 1 month after 4.1 final. I must admit that the kde4 desktop looks very nice but would suggest that it's best kept in virtualbox for a while. I think suse may well be harming kde's reputation by releasing KDE4. It's not really ready. Interestingly their installation selection order is also gnome,kde4,kde stable without any indication of the state of kde4. This is a bit of an unknown as they are adding to it all of the time. I'm left with the impression that novel are chasing unbuntu / developing the next version of sled some what aggressively with out much regard for their traditional user base.

 

 

John

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  • 1 month later...

Yesterday I found myself in the pretty unique position of being in a place where I had a 2Mb/s bandwidth on my gsm modem. Obviously the first thing I did was to update Mandriva 2008.1 and Cooker (but it still won't boot properly), but not satisfied with that I took the opportunity to download Suse 11. On my old laptop Suse was a real dog, it did nothing, almost as little as Fedora, but not quite. On my new machine however it installs pretty easily and more or less works straight away. Reading the posts above I was surprised to find that one of the criticisms of Suse 11 is that it is slow. I found it the complete opposite. It boots in 50 sec flat - Mandriva takes 90. Neither was there any question of it appearing to run any slower than Mandriva either. It also handles my vodafone gsm modem beautifully, even better than Mandriva does, in that it will store the settings that you initially input making subsequent connections a one-click affair, I wish Mandriva was that good (and yes I know about network profiles and I also know how useless they are - in fact every time I enable one it crashes my xserver and sound server and requires me to log in again, the subsequent login takes ages due to the amount of error messages and the final result is that the profile doesn't work anyway. It is a whole lot easier to enter all the configuration information every time, but not how it should be.). The other advantage it has is that package management is also much faster than Mandriva's, but then so is everybody elses package management.

 

That is the good news, the bad news however is that my other gsm modem is simply not detected at all (other than as a storage device). Now on Mandriva it is not detected as a modem unless I cold boot, but on Suse it is never detected as a modem making it (and therefore the distro as a whole) unusable for me at least.

 

There is one other downside, and it is a serious one, but it is not Novell's fault. That downside is KDE4. In the past alchemists used to seek to turn base metal into gold, they never succeeded, but the KDE developers have succeeded in reverse. They have taken the gold standard of desktop environments - KDE 3.5.9 - and turned it into base metal. KDE4 is the 'Vista' of the Linux world, ugly, unloved and unwanted. It really takes a lot to make me think of Gnome as an attractive alternative, but KDE4 has done it. In its present form it is just a joke.

 

Mind you I said that about the EePc as well and I believe they have sold over a million units of that to date, so what do I know?

 

I know what I like, that is what I know, and it certainly isn't KDE4. Luckily the extra large bandwidth of yesterday enabled me to download KDE3 later on and have a sensible desktop environment, and once I had done so I really liked Suse 11, but I would never use it whilst it can't detect my second gsm modem.

 

In summary, if you never have cause to use an unusual gsm modem, then it is really worth a look. I was pretty impressed (once I got rid of KDE4) and I have never been impressed by Suse before and I have been trying it ever since version 9.something.

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It really takes a lot to make me think of Gnome as an attractive alternative, but KDE4 has done it. In its present form it is just a joke.

 

don't forget XFCE ;)

 

I felt the same about kde4.1 too, so sar I am really disappointed :(

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That is the good news, the bad news however is that my other gsm modem is simply not detected at all (other than as a storage device).

I just read something a few minutes ago from AW that may solve this for you.

http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?p=515496#515496

 

BTW, I was quite impressed with the openSUSE KDE Live CD. I did not install it, just ran it from the CD.

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ffi: I don't think the two of us are entirely alone in our dismay about the current state of KDE4 I have read many complaints about it around the net. I can only hope that it improves with time.

 

David: Thanks for that link I have added a reply to it on the other forum.

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ffi: I don't think the two of us are entirely alone in our dismay about the current state of KDE4 I have read many complaints about it around the net. I can only hope that it improves with time.

 

Yesterday I read this article and it gave me a little hope

 

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080...eed-a-fork.html

 

now if they get rid if those annoying to toolboxes popping up around icons and plasmoids, that annoying vista-like icon hightlight and that useless blob in the top right corner I would be happy

 

 

that and of course adding previews back again to the file selector, improving performance with nvidia cards and I would consider upgrading to kde4

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