I just wanted to say Hello. I’m not new to linux. Just new to this forum. I’ve been using linux since the mid 90’s. I started with Redhat, Then moved to Debian. I have used several distros over the years most were debian based, and most running off the unstable branch. I’m getting old enough I just want it to load and run, but young enough I still lean towards bleeding edge. I decides a few months ago while I was testing different distos to give Opensuse a try. So I installed 12.1, upgraded it to factory and have been messing with it since. Currently I am running 12.2 with factory repos for KDE and QT5. KDE. I pretty much will be on the forum to looking for solutions, but wanted to take a minute to introduce myself incase I decide to comment on something.
Welcome to the forums! Hope you stick around, and I’m sure you’ll be able to share your Linux knowledge with others who come looking for help here. 
Welcome.
Look around here. I do not dare to point you to the “New users” stickies and Articles, but there may be some typicaly openSUSE things in there. Take it easy and enjoy.
Hi Barry, welcome
Growing older makes you want to move from bleeding edge but not really? Have a good read on Tumbleweed. In short somewhere inbetween released version and Factory. Time doesn’t allow me instability, yet I don’t want to be too far away from bleeding edge. Must say, Tumbleweed delivers; up to date, and rock stable.
I pushed my luck a little with Factory today and ended up re-installing. Upgrading to Tumbleweed now. Then I will see where I am at and if I want to add the Factory KDE repos and push it back up to 4.9.90.
Like I said not new to linux, but I tend to push it enough my wife won’t let me touch her laptop except for fresh installs. I figure when I am done I will have a good balance of rolling/bleeding installed.
There’s nothing wrong with reading “New User” articles and stickies. There are times it triggers the obvious that is being overlooked. I am finding what I need to transition from aptitude to zypper. and how to remove the stuff I don’t like such as apper and packagekit. Other than that it is linux and nice polished distro. You have to like that.
I’m liking this distro a lot. It is stable, ascetically polished, and it is user friendly. My wife loves it. So no more windows here. 
Let me throw in my welcome as well. We are here to serve and if you need assistance, you only need to ask. I am into writing “hopefully” useful bash scripts. You can get the lot of them by downloading just one you can find in this link here:
openSUSE 12.2 Bash Script Download Bonanza! with Bash Script Loader: https://forums.opensuse.org/blogs/jdmcdaniel3/opensuse-12-2-bash-script-download-bonanza-bash-script-loader-115/
Thank You for using openSUSE,
I’ll add my voice to the chorus and say welcome also !
IMHO there can be a world of difference between the stability of applications (and the basic OS) in factory, and applications in Tumbleweed. Note for any application (and basic OS functionality) to be in Tumbleweed, it first needs to make it into Factory. Then I believe there is sort of a Tumbleweed unstable repository where selected factory rpms are tested, prior to being brought into mainstream Tumbleweed. And while Tumbleweed tries hard to be stable, it is also likely less stable than the official release, and even Tumbleweed can have things broken at times, and require a roll back.
On a different note (but relevant to new uers), Multimedia and video driver ease of install can sometimes be the aspect that new users dislike about openSUSE, and I hope you have those sorted ? (Multimedia can typically be upgraded via the appropriate Packman repository, and video drivers (if using nVidia/ATI) can either be installed from the appropriate repository, or direct from the nVidia/ATI binary).
wrt user friendliness, I have my 86+ year old mother (who lives in a different continent than I) on a supported version of openSUSE w/KDE (also with WinXP running in a Virtual session under openSUSE on her PC). This works well for her (and I maintain her PC remotely over the Internet via vnc and ssh). I also video chat with her 4 to 5 nights a week via Skype, and on occasion train her on openSUSE aspects via vnc and Skype. I moved her to openSUSE a number of years back after it became clear she could never last a year on a clean WinXP install without various virus crippling her PC (and no one able to help her on that). Back in those pre-openSUSE days, she would be without a functioning PC for weeks every year due to being crippled by virus. Back then on my annual visit to see her, I would re-install winXP on her PC to restore the functionality destroyed by the virus. Unfortunately, the various winXP anti-virus programs were not user friendy enough for her to keep her dedicated winXP PC running. Constantly re-installing winXP was not an option I liked, so I moved her to openSUSE. Of course since I am a continent away, I am very careful what I update on her PC, with my deliberations adding what I hope is an extra layer of stability beyond what the official update repos provide.
Now she has both OS (winXP and openSUSE) and she is doing well. Her friends are amazed she runs GNU/Linux and still knows about WinXP.
I installed Tumbleweed and added the Factory KDE repos, and that didn’t work so well. Long story short is I have a fresh install of Tumbleweed with a zypper patch reboot, zypper patch reboot, zypper up, zypper dup. all is working well. So for now I will leave it alone unless I get bored and think I can’t live without KDE 4.9.90. If that happens I will just go full Factory.
My mom lives 2000 mile away I work on her Vista system from here with TeamViewer. I’m Fixing to send her a copy of 12.2 and a flash drive with some extras on it and move her over to openSUSE.
Team viewer is pretty neat. I used it couple of times with my wife’s winXP (running in a Virtual Session on openSUSE), when the openSUSE Virtual Box virtualization of WinXP with ‘vnc’ struggled with keyboard translations on XP. But that ‘vnc’ problem has been fixed, and so I no longer use TeamViewer.
After you install openSUSE on your mother’s PC, it may be worth considering installing a Microsoft OS in a Virtual Session on the PC. I note that Vista is a bit of a resource hog, and that Windows7 has a similar ‘look/feel’, so if you can find an inexpensive OEM (?) version of Windows7, it might be worth while installing that in a Virtual Session on that same PC. It may help ease the transition of your mother to openSUSE. She will have an easy choice of two Operating Systems and two Desktops.
My mother dual booted between winXP and openSUSE for a number of years. Typically she rarely booted to openSUSE, until winXP stopped functioning, then she would switch to openSUSE. Statistic wise, that mean 10 to 11 months of the year on winXP and 1 to 2 months of the year on openSUSE. Gradually she became more familiar with openSUSE. Then 2 to 3 years back, I replaced her ancient Dell computer with a newer HP Core i7 PC. Unfortunately I could not get a dual win7 and openSUSE to work on her PC (as they required different BIOS settings), and my mother disliked Windows7 (as she was familiar with openSUSE-KDE and winXP interface) so I simply set the BIOS such that openSUSE could boot (effectively disabling the stock win7) and put winXP in a Virtual Box setting. For a while she used winXP about 50% of the time in its Virtual Box ‘wrapper’ , but now I would venture she uses openSUSE 95% of the time.
I have a copy of the winXP virtual hard drive backed up on her computer and on the couple of occasions she broke her winXP virual install (due to virus), I simply accessed her PC and deleted the virtual hard drive and replaced it with the backup, via a simple copy operation. My mother uses HotMail for her email, and so there was nothing lost there. I’ve setup her VirtualBox winXP to store pix, data, etc on to her openSUSE /home partition, so when I replace winXP nothing is lost.
This approach has made my maintenance approach very easy.
The worst that has happened thus far, is my mother has on occasion deleted all icons off her KDE4 desktop (I have no idea how she has done this) and I have had to log on to her openSUSE and recreate the folders and put the icons in the exact place she likes them. I have a backup of the appropriate desktop files stored on her PC, so this is not as difficult as it sounds. She does not have this problem often anymore, as she has learned to keep her KDE ‘widgets locked’.
The other problem she has sometimes is she will jam the print queue, and I need to log on to her PC and clear her print queue so she can print to her printer. Fortunately this is all easily doable with vnc.
Being able to chat with Skype, and upon request access her desktop with vnc (where she can show me things and I can show her things) is absolutely incredible, given the distances involved (her in mid-west Canada and me in central Europe). The 8-hour time zone difference is possibly the biggest complication.
On 12/10/2012 11:56 PM, Barry B wrote:
> and added the Factory KDE repos
it is best to always consider any repo with the word ‘factory’ in its
address as BROKEN…because during any second of any day it might
be…it is a “factory” where code is activally being worked on for the
next release…
right now, in http://software.opensuse.org/developer/ is a
frozen in time copy of the PRE-beta openSUSE 12.3 Milestone 1, which a
LOT of folks find as VERY rough to unusable, and factory contains code
newer (and LESS tested/dependable during any second) than the too rough
to use Milestone…
think about it: they tried to take a snapshot of factory which kinda
worked, named it Milestone 1 and turned it loose for testing…
if you want to ‘test’ the rougher than that code you are welcome, but
you should not expect it to be useful…most folks here who try to run
factory do so on a sandbox…without putting their real data at risk.
–
dd http://goo.gl/PUjnL