my favorite openSUSE 11.2 features
My enthusiasm for openSUSE has not stopped yet, and already, I have went through a lot of interesting and exciting proposed features of openSUSE 11.2. Here is a list of them:
Add web-browser for openSUSE installation
Port of YaST-Qt control center to Qt4
Official USB stick images
Installation into Windows partition
Look at Plymouth for boot
As you can see, “Installation into Windows partition” is already available in Ubuntu through Wubi, and some other distributions provide USB stick images and Fedora 10 has Plymouth, so why shouldn’t we have some of those? Isn’t free software about collaboration? =)
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Quick look: openSUSE
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!
