I’ve upgraded two of my machines from 11.4 to 12.1 - a laptop and a desktop, and would like to share a comparative opinion amongs two.
Please post your impressions, similar experience and/or suggestions on how to deal with issues.
Bootup:
11.4 was fine, with 12.1 the laptop booted fine, but the desktop (P4@3GHz, 3GB ram) would only boot if “nosmp” option is added. If the same machine is booted with sysvinit there’s no problem.
Graphics:
11.4: after kernel upgrade to 2.6.37.6 from 2.6.37.1 the official nvidia repository didn’t get updated anymore -> can’t boot if not taking the trouble and reinstalling by hand
12.1: the repository is ok
Networking:
11.4: laptop was fine both wired/wireless, except that on 11.4 the laptop the wifi would only connect to 801.x network with the gnome networkmanager applet (nm-applet).
12.1: on laptop the wired ethernet stopped working. The device is there, but no cable is sensed. Booting back to 11.4 - works fine (e.g. no hardware defects).
12.1: on laptop - wireless works, with only disappointing change in knetworkmanager applet - previously clicking on the current Wifi network would reconnect, now it only displays extra stats. I would prefer to have the reconnect function. And now I can’t run the nm-applet from KDE since I can’t kill the knetworkmanager applet anymore, it’s not a regular “executable” process anymore.
desktop: wired ethernet would eventually start losing packets on both systems, this actually started since 11.3->11.4 transition. reloading the module with debug flag helps.
CPU:
on 11.4 I could force the CPU to run on high frequency even on battery, with 12.1 this isn’t possible anymore, or the tools have changed so much that I can’t find them anymore…
And the sad conclusion: hundreds (if not thousands) of people worked to make a good product, and somehow the outcome wasn’t really worth the effort (again, my PERSONAL, subjective opinion). Why?
P.S. When I tried to submit this topic, I ended up with an empty page. 5 minutes of retries, and luckily the “restore autosaved content” had most of the text… Seems like the best distro ever is experiencing some difficult times…
This forum is for providing instructions on how to perform some task in openSUSE and not for your opinion of using any openSUSE version. I shall move this to the appropriate forum, chit-chat I think. I ask everyone to wait at least 10 minutes until this is moved to the correct location before you make another post.
I can only speak from personal experience. For me, 11.4 was quite good, but 12.1 is even better. It’s faster and more stable than previous versions, and I haven’t found anything that doesn’t work as expected. I’m also running KDE 4.8, which is the best KDE so far. I have no experience with upgrades as I always do a clean install. I tried upgrades in the past with various Linux distros and had weird results, so I just backup my data and start from scratch. ATM I have a test installation of 12.2 M1 and although there are a few things that don’t quite work yet, on balance it seems to be very good.
I agree with you that openSUSE 12.1 is better than using openSUSE 11.4. I can say that version 12.1 had a slow start which I attribute to the switch to using systemd, but it has been improved and the many updates overall have made it into a powerhouse in my opinion. I have switched completely to using openSUSE 12.1. For anyone that is looking for minor fixes when using openSUSE 12.1 here are my suggestions:
On 2012-03-17 07:36, oboedad55 wrote:
> I have no
> experience with upgrades as I always do a clean install. I tried
> upgrades in the past with various Linux distros and had weird results,
You have not specified what type of upgrade you have used. Online or
offline upgrade? Upgrades have lots of issues, and you haven’t said
anything about what you encountered.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
The laptop was a clean install, the desktop was a “zupa-dupa” (e.g. zypper dup). Both went fine, to the extent that the desktop froze after reboot (the nosmp flag missing).
I am happy to help dich and only want your thread to get the absolute most coverage in the right forum. Its what we are here for and you only need to let us know if you need any other help in in the openSUSE forums.
ok, this is what I plan to do now - I’ll boot both machines from a liveUSB and see if the observed defects were installation-related or somehow caused by hardware.
I just hate having something that works fine, and with the next update/upgrade stops doing so.
I had a few issues with 12.1 from a fresh install. Amarok crashing (rarely) and Dolphin crashing if I tried to show the hidden menu bar. Updates fixed both of those issues. The only issues that I have now are the akonadi popup warning me it is not installed right. To work around this I just disabled it from autostarting in the config file and uninstalled kontact suite (since it relies on akonadi running). Though of course I am sure I was just missing some akonadi packages because I used the live usb to install. Other than a few annoyances my experience has been very good. I am hoping that OpenSUSE can let me switch from Debian.
Compared to older versions of KDE, I think 4.7 is an obvious improvement, especially with Desktop effects which now work great on my intel gpu.
For some reason 12.1 doesn’t like my computer. Everytime i install it,
the internet is not available.
Now i just moved back to 11.4 since that works best. Sadly, i can not
replicate it and not sure why. Maybe my motherboard (which is older) or
something else.
In the end, 12.1 gave me to many headaches upon installing.
Also, for some reason 12.1 doesn’t pass the reboot after installing, i
mean the soft reboot.
I am sure it has something to do with the graphics card, but until 12.1
it was never an issue.
So now i am just waiting for the next release. Hopefully then it will
work better.