Quick look: openSUSE
April 3, 2008 at 9:01 pm (Quick look, linux)
Tags: openSUSE, Quick look, zypper, kernel, yast, control center, slab, slab menu
after a while using Fedora, I thought I would give openSUSE a try. After all it’s a popular distro and is used by many! After using it for a week now, I’m satisfied with it, so far so good. However, there are some features I like, and some that I don’t. First I will go for what I like about it.
- SLAB menu: Ok, here it is, probably the first feature I noticed 
It is a very useful and easy to use and generally very nice menu. Novell has done a great job in usability research. Congratulations!! I should say one of the things that keeps me on openSUSE is this very menu. Looks nice, everything is right there, straight forward! More Applications, More Documents and More Places buttons are very useful, especially the ‘more applications’ one!
- Control Center and Yast: Good interface, though you have to look carefully for everything, but you can just type the name of what you want, in the search field. Very handy! again, quite usable and intuitive. And also, you can find almost anything in whether Yast or Control Center, which is a good point!
- Different repos are available: though it usually leads to mixed repos, but it’s a nice thing to have all the repos in one spot, so you don’t have to look for them any further than opensuse.org
- Welcome sound: hahahaha sounds funny but I really like the sound when you login and logout
for the most part, these features were the outstanding visible features. Other things would go under these sections for example the availability of configuration for everything would go under Control Center stuff. Now let’s look at the downfalls of openSUSE ( there aren’t much but still ).
- Zypper is slow: Comparing Zypper to Yum, yum is a much faster package manager than zypper. Installing the same package using these two package manager really shows how slow Zypper is. Also Zypper doesn’t have an organized output when using it in terminal, so I usually end up looking back and forward to see what has been done!
- relatively older kernel version: It’s not a big issue, but I would like to always have the latest and greatest. Kernel version in openSUSE is relatively lower than in Fedora. It’s just a matter of 2.6.22 or 2.6.24, not a big deal!
that’s it, not a whole lot of dislikes but rather likes I’d like to know about your thoughts on openSUSE, so please comment!
Quick look: openSUSE | Quick Work said,
April 3, 2008 at 10:05 pm
[...] slowe wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptafter a while using Fedora, I thought I would give openSUSE a try. It is a popular distro! After using it for a week now, I’m satisfied with it. There are some features I like about it, and some that I don’t. … [...]
Benjamin Weber said,
April 4, 2008 at 1:49 am
zypper will be significantly faster in 11.0, see http://youtube.com/watch?v=XB3o4Skka5Q
In my experience 10.3 zypper is fairly equivalent in speed to yum. zypper does default to automatically refreshing metadata for repositories, so it could be doing large metadata downloads during the install. You can disable this behaviour and refresh the repositories manually if you prefer.
There are newer kernels available for 10.3 in buildservice repositories, it’s not a good idea to use them though as they’re unsupported.
If you want the bleeding edge you can always run Factory, which is the equivalent of Rawhide in fedora.
Feel free to drop into #suse on freenode if you have other questions.
Mark said,
April 4, 2008 at 2:34 am
I agree, package management is not nearly as good as practically any other distro. However, if you install smart, that speeds things up considerably. Also, when you use zypper for a while and do updates, you system gradually becomes broken. Not good, but once again, smart fixes this. I hear that zypper will be much better in 11.0 which is due out sooner than later.
fengshaun said,
April 4, 2008 at 2:42 am
@ Benjamin:
WOW, that was a great video. Yea, it’s definitely much faster, thanks for pointing that. I might just try to enable some buildservice repos, see what I can get!!
@ Mark:
Well, I haven’t used smart, but I will definitely use it in near future. I’ve heard a lot about it! But as Benjamin pointed out, zypper will be much faster in 11.0!
ridgeland said,
April 4, 2008 at 9:27 pm
I have SuSE and use it only for Skype. One reason I don’t use it more is that awful menu system of Slab and Yast. Try to set up a user to auto-logon after 10 second of no new user login! Even edits to simple text configuration files go through layers of Yast.
Maybe it’s good for a first day ex-Windows user, but the effort to have a non-standard Gnome interface is a disservice. Linux needs standards that stick to the Unix rule of keeping it simple not more fragmentation of unique efforts to look like Windows.
Boycott Novell » Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part I: OpenSUSE and Linspire Catchup said,
April 5, 2008 at 2:52 am
[...] is a new mini review of OpenSUSE, but be aware the the writer’s first language is not English, so it’s just [...]
Grósz Dániel said,
April 9, 2008 at 8:48 pm
ridgeland: SLAB can be replaced with the traditional menu in GNOME on openSUSE.
SteveB said,
April 16, 2008 at 3:20 am
I am just about to try it as server option on an IBM Xseries so any comments regarding this would be awesome as I have only ever used Fedora on such systems in the past.
Also note: I am looking at this as a production server?