Despite the fact that I know the openSUSE developers don’t read this forum, the purpose of this post is to thank them for their magnificent work on the openSUSE 13.1 release.
My first ‘real’ computer was an Hitachi Peach with a MB6890 processor (the same processor used on the Fairlight CMI digital audio sampler) running C/PM OS. (What a rip-off MS DOS was!) Back in the 1980’s, we ran correspondence, contracts, accounts and databases for a 200 site community rental housing co-op on that. After an initial introduction to GNU/Linux via Debian and Red Hat I have used SuSE Linux and its successors as my primary OS since the late 1990’s. I still know only just enough about GNU/Linux administration to get by as a general user and not nearly enough to dare to try to assist other users on this forum (phew!). Over those years I have learnt a bit about many other wonderful GNU/Linux distributions and have great and enduring respect for all developers contributing to the open source ‘libre’ software economy.
I have just completed a fresh net install of openSUSE 13.1 on my antiquated 32 bit, 2 core laptop, previously running openSUSE 11.4 with evergreen support. All went well and fast (except one minor glitch downloading printer drivers, fixed after first reboot).
I know mine was an easy case. Given the vast range of devices and use circumstances that openSUSE serves there will be glitches. GNU/Linux does not have the marketing and contractual ‘lock-in’ that major commercial OS distributors rely on. But community support works wonders so please take your issues to the support forum sections. I read them daily. The quality and transparency of support provided is astounding.
I do do what I can to assist software developers but, as a very general user, speaking only English, I can’t do much, so thanks to openSUSE org for providing a chit-chat section in this forum where I can offer my heartfelt thanks to all my fellow Geekos.
I too am beginning sing my praises of openSUSE 13.1, even for a fresh brand new version it runs like a dream and I have not encountered any real major issues.
Lovely to meet someone else, Tallowwood, who moved straight from CP/M to Linux. Hope to install 13.1 over the weekend and look forward to an equally smooth experience.
My thanks too. Out of laziness, I overcame my resistance to zypper and upgraded smoothly by following the lucid instructions for a a complete operating system upgrade.
Watching 1.47GB of packages download, unpack and install themselves in so short a time made me more aware than ever of how talented and painstaking the people are to whom I owe my elegant, powerful system.
I choir 100%! From Fedora at primary workstation to 12.2…now 13.1 and I can see no reason to move back to Fedora
(which is awesome in many ways too). Kudos to all developers + the whole team!
Used zypper dup and everything went smoothly except the printer configuration. Neither CUPS nor YaST could see the PPDs and only started to ‘see’ them after I had loaded a PPD into each manually. Then the printer started sulking probably because it had received a series of contradictory instructions. So I finally turned it off, deleted the configuration and reinstalled it from scratch.
Then, when I tried to print an envelope from LibreOffice, I got the same error as with an earlier version of LibreOffice. Though previously set to print Landscape, the printer property for each envelope had gone back to Portrait. So I had to reset it for each envelope. Finally, they printed the opposite way round to previously; so the openings of the first couple were at the bottom instead of the top. But, between two earlier versions of LibreOffice, I had had to reorient the envelopes. So I’m now back to where I started off with printing envelopes!
The only other oddity was that KPDF had suddenly become the default PDF reader in place of Okular but that was quickly rectified.
Though I have a KDE desktop, I like the look of the Gnome apps that I use.
Thanks from me also, openSUSE. openSUSE has a special place in my heart since 11.4 was the first distro i ever tried after starting linux with Ubuntu 10.10. I can say this is a very friendly distro, also begginer friendly (i’m a non techie person, nor programmer, just an ordinary desktop user), and it works like a charm. Well, maybe only Gnome will need a little to settle in and work without hiccups, but i hope this will be fixed during updates, since this is evergreen.
