I successfully upgraded my 11.1 (Lenovo T60p) to 11.2. I used a DVD to initiate the upgrade. The upgrade process itself was smooth except that a 3 (X11 based) packages gave read errors. I could upgrade those packages as well after initializing software repositories to online repos.
The new theme (Sonar - did some mods to match my taste) looks clean and polished. Somehow, I feel that the menus looks a little cluttered not very readable with the black background…
There were a few problems as usual…
I cleaned up my home and recreated some settings when login to my home keeps the CPU throttling for ever. I noticed its mainly due to nautilus. It took some time to figure out that nautilus is restarting continuously (from .xsession errors). I’ve my desktop setting set to “show_desktop=false” as I prefer a clean desktop. Here is a redhat bug report about this. This was working on 11.1.
Found that gnome-keybinding-properties doesn’t give any windowmanager options. The leftside pane was marked as “not defined”. I noticed that gnome-keybinding-properties is trying to read configuration from compiz though compiz was not enabled.
(gnome-keybinding-properties:7901): keybinding-properties-WARNING **: No description for key '/apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options/run_key'
Finally, I removed all compiz packages. I can set shortcut and that works now…
As usual, ATI drivers are still broken. There are no drivers available from www2.ati.com though its mentioned here. The drivers I downloaded from the stage area doesn’t load. I get the following symbol issues. The workaround found are to rebuild kernel with MSI support. Hmmm…Haven’t done that yet.
Upsides:
The splash screen and new background designs etc look FANTASTIC. I meant, REALLY cool.
It’s easier to install and set up, I think. My network configuration ran smoothly, printer setup ditto.
I had WAY less trouble with NVIDIA graphics drivers than I did for openSUSE 11.1 - whether this is to do with newer NVIDIA drivers, or better handling of the system by openSUSE I don’t know.
Downsides:
The menu and configuration setup is still terrible. Considering that this is supposed to be a user friendly version of Linux, I’d really thought this should be sorted out by now. Why are there multiple different settings panels (system settings, yast, configure desktop,etc)? We only need one, which works - rather than three which don’t. The system settings is particularly bad - it’s not intuitive at all (maybe this should be a KDE4 moan? standby…). Seriously, it’s time to trim down the so-called flexibility of this OS - every different application, widget, applet or whatever uses a different setup menu. We need to centralise this functionality before this operating system can become usable by ‘the general public’ rather than ‘serious linux users’.
My feeling is that KDE 4 is massively letting us down with the release that comes bundled with openSUSE 11.2:
They’ve changed the oxygen theme. For goodness sake, it was fantastic. Why even touch it? Now the active window looks exactly the same as the inactive windows (except for a subtle blue halo), plus various other mods. Can we think about a policy of not changing themes? Just adding new ones - that way, when you find one you like, you don’t have to change your theme when the next version of SUSE comes out.
The panel is even less friendly than in openSUSE 11.1. The hours I spend mucking about with this **** thing beggars belief.
The kickoff menu isn’t size adjustable anymore
The desktop folder widgets force you to change their size using the weird icon thing, rather than the intuitive way. You have to do an iterative ‘move then resize then move then resize’ to get the window located where you want in the right size. Who on earth thought that was a good idea??
** Keep up KDE4 - openSUSE 11.2 deserves a better user interface! **
In the meantime - I’m going back to openSUSE 11.1, where the bundled KDE was slightly less annoying…