I’ve been snooping around and looking at videos and reviews of OpenSuse, and I’m quite impressed. Seeing as I have some time to spare, I was toying with the idea of switching to 11.0 from Ubuntu 8.10… however, I’ve got some questions.
I own a Dell Inspiron 1501. I know most stuff is supported, but are there any big hardware things that I should be looking out for?
If I do switch, what’s the real difference between Gnome and KDE? I liked Gnome in Ubuntu because it allowed me to get awn-manager Emerald and make things somewhat aesthetically pleasing(I’m a sucker for a nice-looking desktop). Can KDE do that?
Extension of the previous question: what’s the difference between Ubuntu and OpenSUSE, deep down? I’m used to Terminal in order to fix stuff; what do I do with OpenSUSE? Will I be able to get most anything I had on Ubuntu (Wine, Pidgin, Skype, Opera, etc.) running on OpenSUSE?
If anyone has the answer to any of these questions, I would really like to hear them. This looks like a cool place, and I’ dlike to learn about its distro much more.
You don’t have to switch to KDE. OpenSUSE has GNOME too. You can even install both and try KDE without losing GNOME.
Pretty much all the apps you mention are included or are easy to install.
Deep down it’s all Linux and the same open source apps, but I (and many on this board) happen to think OpenSUSE does a great job of packaging an OS, which is why we like it.
YaST is probably the big difference and from the CLI it’s zypper in
<name> rather than apt-get.
Package groups are different names no build-essential instead it would
be devel_basis for example.
Yes, all of those on your short list are there, even more via this GUI
started from the CLI via /sbin/yast2 webpin_package_search else you can
always look here; Get It
I personally left Ubuntu a few months ago for no other reason than I didn’t like the feel of it. Coming from almost a decade in the redhat family of distros, I didn’t want to have to relearn habits and methods.
I personally see Open Suse as the best of both words: the stability and usability of my years in the RH camp, with the freedom of choice offered by Ubuntu.
The feel of OS is more proffesional and I have yet to have a problem I couldn’t just guess from my exerpiece where to look or find the answer in these forums. In either case I was on to the next thing within 15 minutes.
I guess, for me it boiled down to the parent company’s philosophy and how it was represented in the product.
I have openSUSE 11.0 Gnome on my Dell Latitude D400, and it has most flawless hardware support , better than Ubuntu on it. OpebSUSE is a little bit harder to use than Ubuntu, but it is far more professional.
I just did that. I was running Ubuntu 8.10, but I was getting annoyed by the performance of some applications I was using. For instance Skype was so much trouble… I had to kill pulseaudio in order to use. Not to mention the fact that my calls would be dropped very frequently.
Skype aside, I’m using maxima, wxmaxima (computer algebra system) as well as texmacs and texmaker (LaTeX editors). In ubuntu I couldn’t get the latest version from the repositories, so I had to compile them from source which led me to great lengths of frustration (since I’m a newbie). In the end I managed to get everything working ok, except for skype and ekiga…
The only complain I have of OpenSuSe 11.1 (GNOME) so far is that it seems to be overall slower than ubuntu 8.10, at least on my laptop. It seems heavier, which is natural considering it has a lot more stuff.
OpenSuSe had packages for all the software I required (latest version). If they are not in the repos, one can get them from the build service!
Skype works great. My webcam works well. Though I still can’t seem to get it to work with ekiga…but I don’t use it anyways.
At the end of the day we all use linux and as ken_yapp says, the only difference really is the presentation/package.
Some distros like mandrake are more bleeding edge aimed at the gadget man. Others like ubuntu and debian based ones, are solid but without the extras.
If you are a control freek and like doing it all yourself, you want to try slackware.
It’s all a matter of taste. You know your hardware works with linux, so it should be fine with most of the other ditros too.
Get some live cds and play around and install the one you like most.
