openSuSE 10.2: the first ten minutes
I borrowed an openSuSE 10.2 DVD from Anton and finally got around to giving it a whirl. Here are my thoughts about it:
- GRUB bootsplash and boot-up is very nice and swish; better than Ubuntu
- installer is way behind the Ubuntu equivalent; there is too much choice and potential to go wrong
- partition editor is a recipe for disaster; different disks aren’t clearly defined: it would be very easy for a newbie to nuke their disk by accident
- the install went smoothly and the overall presentation of the OS is good
- GNOME support is much improved over previous releases; it feels like less of an afterthought
- I ended up with a CD-only application repository thanks to not having an uplink at install time. YaST2 sucks monkey balls; this is a real shame considering how great it used to be. The options are ambiguous and it took me a good amount of time to find out how to add a new YUM repository
- What is YUM? What is ZEN? What is going on with the consistency in this operating system? There are two available tools to add/update repositories and whatnot. One of them crashed half-way through, and the other wanted me to insert a disc!
- YUM is very slow, apt/deb is far superior
- Installing nvidia drivers was more complicated than Ubuntu (I gave up)
- The GNOME slab is very nice, not because it is better, but because it is good that people are thinking about things
- Beagle (with the Firefox plugin) by default is good news for all
- I didn’t get the 3D desktop stuff working
- Nice to have some proprietary stuff included by default: Flash, etc.
- My webcam wasn’t recognised (Ubuntu manages it)
- Much improved integration between KDE and GNOME
Overall I wasn’t impressed. Some things are definitely ahead of Ubuntu: the GRUB menu is one big thing that I think the Ubuntu guys need to concentrate on. It seems the Novell guys are spending more time with whiz-bang than they are on the fundamentals.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, now have a very solid foundation and the next release (which won’t install on my machine right now (but it is an alpha)) should definitely help level things out.
If you want desktop Linux: use Ubuntu.