OpenSUSE 11.2 the Perfect KDE Distribution

[anshuljain]

My take...
Is Opensuse the best KDE distro? Well, its close, very close, However, Mandriva's close and in some respects is better with a tighter KDE integration than Opensuse.

IMO, the best KDE distro out there is Chakra Project/KDEMod/Arch Linux. Granted that it isn't the distro for newbies...but once booted up, Chakra's KDEMod is simply snappy, stable and amazingly well tweaked with a very very low memory footprint (approx 90-100MB at boot). I really really like Opensuse, but I feel that Chakra's the one to watch out for...

[mmarif4u]

Originally Posted by anshuljain

My take...
Is Opensuse the best KDE distro? Well, its close, very close, However, Mandriva's close and in some respects is better with a tighter KDE integration than Opensuse.

IMO, the best KDE distro out there is Chakra Project/KDEMod/Arch Linux. Granted that it isn't the distro for newbies...but once booted up, Chakra's KDEMod is simply snappy, stable and amazingly well tweaked with a very very low memory footprint (approx 90-100MB at boot). I really really like Opensuse, but I feel that Chakra's the one to watch out for...

Now my take:
I am not agree a little bit on Mandriva, yeh its true that they really ported it well on stability side, but if we look at the speed side, its terrible. I used it for more than 3 months and i give up on it because of speed issues, other than that its quite stable in all respects.

And agree on Chakra, you can say that they did it well while porting KDE.

But openSUSE 11.2 IMHO is quite ahead from that distros now in speed, stability and others. As discussed in this thread, no software is bug free, so we can't continue more on that side. But overall 11.2 will prove it that openSUSE is the best.

And in the last thanks to zayed2001 for such a good article to encourage users to use openSUSE.

[BrownieCat]

Originally Posted by microchip8

KDE4 for me has been crash free / freeze free ever since version 4.2

Also, wrt no software is bug free. not true

for i in {1..10}; do
    echo $i
done

The above "software" will never have a bug

Me too! The first version of KDE I ever used was 4.2, and it only froze on me once or twice during the whole time I used it.
Next came 4.3, which also crashed very little. But sometimes it crashed with no apparent reason: occasionally when I clicked on the KickOff Application launcher icon, KDE froze and I had to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to get back to the login screen. But I don't think that was a bug, it was something that went wrong because of something I did.
And I completely agree that such a 'software' as you mentioned will never have bugs. Even in some bigger programs, such as simple 2-D games, there are no or very few bugs. I once partially wrote a simple space-war game in BASIC, and although I didn't get further than making the spacecraft move against a black starred background and change it's appearance as it did so, I can tell you that if I had only done the job properly (not writing the bugs myself), it would have been fully bug-free. If you'd ask a more experienced programmer than me to do it, he could have done it.

[Knurpht]

Absolute bugfree programming would mean any possible failure would be caught and corrected. This is where the 'no software is bugfree' idea comes from. It would imply that any piece of software should test bugfreeness of all used external components.
Typo's in comment-lines would be counted etc. etc., microchip's script would have to test if bash (or other programming shell) is used etc. This world is a though world

[gminnerup]

This thread seems to have strayed somewhat... openSUSE may be the best KDE4 implementation (haven't tried any others except, briefly, Mandriva) but the bugs are all KDE's... And noone would claim KDE4 is bug-free, in fact it's riddled with them. I use it, and like it, but even at 4.3.2 it's still pretty frustrating. Try matching activities to desktops (I've done it and succeeded, sort of, but it's a road paved with tears), for example. Or look at the plasmoids: apart from mostly being useless, the majority don't work or crash spectacularly. Kwin can be slow, and KDE4 with Compiz introduces another can of worms (bugs).
I'm happy with it because I like the basic design of Plasma and am prepared to put up with the unpredictable behaviour and poor documentation in the interest of progress, and because I appreciate how free software projects work. If KDE4 manages to realise half its potential by version 4.5 I'll be satisfied. But it doesn't help to gloss over its current shortcomings.

[BrownieCat]

Zayed, that was a good article. If only it hadn't those minor spelling and grammatical mistakes, it would have been perfect. Anyway, it taught me some things about 11.2.
And I agree that openSUSE is indeed the best distro for KDE today. Other distros simply don't seem to care about KDE, only about GNOME.

[faolan]

Originally Posted by BrownieCat

Zayed, that was a good article. If only it hadn't those minor spelling and grammatical mistakes, it would have been perfect. Anyway, it taught me some things about 11.2.
And I agree that openSUSE is indeed the best distro for KDE today. Other distros simply don't seem to care about KDE, only about GNOME.

For better or worse Gnome has seemed to become the standard. After the betas came out for KDE 4, I migrated from KDE 3.5 to Gnome. I've tried every major KDE release, and just have not been satisfied because it always feels as if something is wrong, missing, or out of place. I go back to always Gnome. It's just more mature and stable.

I can see why almost every distro defaults to Gnome today and focuses so much on Gnome development. KDE is full of little frustrations and bumps, whereas Gnome is both polished and mature.

[zayed2001]

Originally Posted by faolan

I can see why almost every distro defaults to Gnome today and focuses so much on Gnome development. KDE is full of little frustrations and bumps, whereas Gnome is both polished and mature.

like openSUSE, Kubutnu, Mandriva, Slackware, Pardus ?

[faolan]

Originally Posted by zayed2001

like openSUSE, Kubutnu, Mandriva, Slackware, Pardus ?

I said almost every, not every. There are far more distros out there that default to Gnome than KDE. That's just statistics. Up until 11.2 the last several versions of openSUSE were even defaulted to Gnome.

Honestly, I would like to see a move back to KDE as the preferred desktop environment of the major distros simply because I think it has a better future than Gnome. Even though the last few releases of KDE have really been lacking in some aspects KDE 4.3 does feel like a good product with a sense of direction even if it has its rough edges and frustrations.

Secondly, knowing how openSUSE puts things to gether, you can guarantee that their KDE will be great. When 11.0 and 11.1 came out they stablized a LOT of backports form 4.1 and 4.2 and merged them in. OpenSUSE had the best KDE4 desktop around, hands down. The devs worked their asses off for it and what they delivered was a truely a good attempt at creating a decent KDE4 environment. I didn't feel that it was quite ready for every day use, but you know what? It was a **** good attempt and it was a lot better than the rest of the distros.

That's onne of the reasons I'm willing to try KDE in 11.3. I know even if it doesn't suit my wants and needs, I'll still be impressed and consider it a serious option to recommend for someone who doesn't like the Gnome version.

If there is one thing to be said about SUSE, it is that Novell's developers and all the unpaid volunteers who develop it put a lot of thought in work into making it the best Linux distro out there for the desktop. They really should feel proud of all the effort they put behind their product. To be honest, I don't see why openSUSE isn't rated higher on Distrowatch and I'm surprised it's never had the #1 slot. Perhaps that should be a goal: to topple Ubuntu's #1 slot on distrowatch -- fairly.

[michael_cheah]

Originally Posted by faolan

If there is one thing to be said about SUSE, it is that Novell's developers and all the unpaid volunteers who develop it put a lot of thought in work into making it the best Linux distro out there for the desktop. They really should feel proud of all the effort they put behind their product. To be honest, I don't see why openSUSE isn't rated higher on Distrowatch and I'm surprised it's never had the #1 slot. Perhaps that should be a goal: to topple Ubuntu's #1 slot on distrowatch -- fairly.

Maybe we can come out with a script to query Distrowatch on every single minute...