A Couple of questions about opensuse, moving from Arch

I’ve been on Arch all year and I’ve loved it, up until this week. I’ve been a big fan of openbox and playing with tiling window managers, lots of CLI apps and such for a while.

But i’ve grown tired of endless keybindings and text files, so I installed KDE4.3 onto arch and it’s been one nightmare after another. I hear good things about 4.3 in OpenSuse though so, I figured to distro hop back to OpenSuse.

But here’s my questions:

  1. Is Yast any faster since 9 and 10? I remember yast being a huge pain
  2. should i do 11.1 and use the kde4.3 repos, then upgrade to 11.2, install the 11.2 beta and just upgrade to stable, or just do 11.1 with kde4.3 and when 11.2 comes out do a clean install? Arch did rolling releases and its made my life easier i’ve found. Is upgrading from one version to another in suse difficult?
  3. are there any major kde4 bugs that plague suse’s implementation that i should be aware of before hand?
  4. I remember really disliking opensuse’s firewall… it’s not too difficult to just uninstall it and go to straight IP tables right?

Is Yast any faster since 9 and 10? I remember yast being a huge pain

Yes, it is.

I remember really disliking opensuse’s firewall… it’s not too difficult to just uninstall it and go to straight IP tables right?

I can’t see the point (as default works for me), but AFAIK you can disable SuSEfirewall2 (via YaST) and use iptables commands instead.

man iptables
man iptables-restore

Just use the KDE4 Live CD from KDE/KDE4 - openSUSE for now and then upgrade to 11.2 when it comes out. 11.2 will complete openSUSE’s shift from KDE3 to KDE4 but there will still be KDE3 applications which have yet to be rewritten for KDE4.

As the openSUSE installer creates a separate /home partition, you will only need to install/upgrade the root partition for 11.2.

openSUSE is heavily involved in KDE development and KDE uses the openSUSE Build Service; so problem bugs are few - I haven’t encountered any since KDE4.2. Just be aware that KDE4 is still under heavy development and not all applications are as feature full as their predecessors in KDE3 (for example, I still find KPDF is better than Okular in several areas). A lot depends on what your needs are.

Is there an install option with 4.3? or is that only the 11.2 beta?

There are various live CDs packaged for openSUSE. A couple packaged by Novell/SuSE-GmbH, and a number of ones with newer/different desktop versions packaged by the community. Take a look here: Live CD - openSUSE
All of these live CDs are “installable”.

As john_hudson pointed out, there is an excellent openSUSE-11.2 KDE-4.3 liveCD packaged by the community that one can install KDE-4.3 from.

While you are not a new Linux user, you are new to openSUSE, so its possible one or two of the points in our Installation stickie may be of interest to you:
NEWBIES - Suse-11.1 Pre-installation – PLEASE READ - openSUSE Forums

You can also install openSUSE (like nearly any other distro) “the Arch way”.

Choose the minimal install with or without X (with X will give you IceWM as preliminary window manager), then add the Repos for KDE 4.3 and build up your desired desktop environment.

You won’t get KDE 4.3 directly from DVD or OSS repo, openSUSE has no rolling release but a lot of extra repos in OBS which give you a lot of bleeding edge software if you want.

Sorry for the confusion but I was trying to point out the 11.1 KDE4.3 Live CD which I have installed. At least, that’s what I thought I had installed!

I’m bad. I meant to say openSUSE-11.1 KDE4.3 live CD. Live CD - openSUSE and here: http://home.kde.org/~binner/kde-four-live/

Even better:
Index of /repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso

Pick the Reloaded iso for your architecture.
BTW about yast being faster? It will knock your socks off.

Nothing much to write and point out here for you. Because every one tried their best to share useful information.
But would add some lines to YaST, Its great package manager and its really fast now. Much faster than *buntu synaptic manager(at least for me).
And 11.2 YaST is going to shake the table.

thanks all for your replies, happyily on 11.1 with KDE 4.3 now.

As (surprisingly) not mentioned here:

If you want to get the real impression how fast/reliable software management on openSUSE has become (and YaST is a lot more than only a package manager), use the CLI frontend “zypper” instead of having to start YaST every time.

I used Arch for a little more than one year (parallel to openSUSE) and with 11.0 zypper was about as fast (and for me a lot more reliable) than packman on Arch, with 11.1 zypper outperformed packman in most cases also in speed.

P.S.

The most important issue concerning package management for me is not performance (as long as $TOOL is reasonably fast I don’t care if $foo is 10 seconds faster as $bar) but reliability in dependency resolution combined with reasonable choices if a conflict can not be solved automatically, which IMHO is the most distinguishing feature of zypper (or YaST as it also uses zypper/libzypp “under the hood”).

I’ve already learned about zypper, i quite like it so far :slight_smile:

Question, in Arch I had to throw in all kinds of xorg.conf options b/c Plasma and Nvidia didn’t play well together. Was this specific to Arch or is the problem strictly between kde/nvidia?

If it’s a problem I’ll just stick with mesa, i see no real reason i absolutely must use nvidia’s proprietary driver.

Lol, Prof. Dr. Sigmund Freud would have loved this.

Freudian slip - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

That’s of course “pacman” for the package manager of Arch while “packman” is of course the most important external repository for openSUSE-users.

It was a problem between kde4/nvidia, this issue was also present on other distros AFAIR, but should no longer be present with recent versions (of KDE4 and proprietary NVidia drivers).

good to know, thanks.

Something I learned at the openSUSE booth at a Linux Fest:

I asked whether when 11.2 comes out in November if I can “upgrade” or if I have to do a new install. The guy at the booth said that I could use

zypper dist-upgrade

to do an upgrade. He says that it works much like apt-get and aptitude for upgrading your system. Can anyone confirm/deny this?

I haven’t tried it myself yet, but I thought I’d share what I was told.

I’ll let you know when 11.2 comes out.