Well mine is different and it doesn’t matter what the KDE theme is. It still looks not in place.
http://www.imagebam.com/image/aaa87d33919901
If you run kcontrol (the old KDE control centre) and chance the style, you’ll find it follows whatever settings you select here.
All the various yast modules (e.g. software management) seem to make use of qt4.
Maybe see if qtconfig or sudo qtconfig help as well…
Is there any philosphical difference between Mandriva and openSUSE? Like about codecs, Microsoft compatibility, non-FOSS, market focus, server integrations, etc.?
@xlr
To that question ask Open Source and Linux Forums
there you can find the answer my friend.
There is more web side like http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Choosing_a_Linux_distribution
you can ask there and I just point you where you can find answer .
That Re: Mandriva vs OpenSUSE
those answer you ask in openSUSE is not … you know.I just be a nice person to person;)
Mike lol!
Good luck
Not quite true…Mandriva’s community has shrunk, yes…but the community support is quite stellar. I was a relative newbie when I came to Mandriva and now I find myself helping others occasionally…a testament to how much Mandriva has taught me.
Hop in and you’ll find a smaller (compared to Ubuntu or Opensuse) but a very very focused and helpful community…and yes, I’m talking about the English one! We won’t make you feel like an alien too 
-Anshul
Not much of a difference between Opensuse and Mandriva. For one, Mandriva’s Free DVD installer is completely FOSS and doesn’t include any firmware (which is included in Opensuse) either. The Mandriva One Live CD includes the Nvidia, ATI…etc drivers by default.
Regarding codecs, they enable only MP3 support by default. The rest of the packages have the infringing stuff removed. To get all of those back, you need the PLF repository.
Regarding MS compatibility, well…its as compatible as the underlying applications are…and they’re more or less similar in Opensuse and Mandriva. Now I cannot say about Mono which is largely an Opensuse “creation” (or a monster- but thats my personal opinion- I am against Mono).
Market Focus- Mandriva as a company is/was focused largely on the desktop market. It makes its living by selling Powerpack subscriptions which include a lot of the codecs, binary drivers, proprietary applications like Skype, Flash, Acrobat, Opera etc and 1 years support…all for 50$.
Mandriva has recently formed the Mandriva Linux Assembly, and is in the process of having more community participation in the development, marketing and other technical aspects of the distro. Something similar to what exists between Opensuse and Novell/Suse.
-Anshul
Thanks for the info anshuljain. Very interesting. Its not a distro I’ve ever been tempted to try, but nice to have the comparison from a recent perspective.
I’ve tried Mandriva’s latest, Gnome and KDE. It is very polished and everything works. MCC is very pleasant to use. My only negative is that Mandriva has always run slow on my hardware. Even with EXT4 it feels so much slower than Ubuntu. Other that than, I would recommend it to anyone.
(hello again, old friends!)
I’m currently running Mandriva 2009.1 spring, because I wanted to have latest KDE 4.2 desktop. Default KDE desktop in 11.1 just did not cut it for me and I never really figured out how to upgrade to the later versions using KDE repos (biggest problem: which repos do I need, what to update, dependencies)…
Mandriva with KDE 4.2 is very very nice although I must admit it does feel a little sluggish at times. Not sure if this is due to Mandriva or KDE 4.2.x … I also run Wine+Prince of Persia 2008 on it and that runs very good.
I like the control center, more so than I did in previous versions and overall network is very responsive. Everything is well thought-out, including when you are lacking multimedia support. I must say I found this easier than Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (which I also tried for a short while).
I still have problems with Wireless though, a problem I have had with ALL Linux distros I have tried up to now. I can only do one network task at a time… for example if I am downloading something and I browse to a webpage, there is a big chance the download will stall&fail. And also if I download a file, it can stall&fail after a while. No problems on WinXP though. What I suspect (for lack of a better explanation) is that the wireless signal is not good enough and Windows is less ‘picky’ about that somehow. Bittorrent with Vuze on Linux runs like a charm though, although I do have to enable ‘http seeding’ or something like that - might be because of my (very) old access point.
I did have one KDE-related crash, but after exploring the hell out of KDE options&settings.
Currently I prefer Mandriva 2009.1 Spring to OpenSUSE 11.1, but largely due to KDE version… I did read there is supposed to be a respin somewhere? Does anyone have a link?
Darkelve
Index of /repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso
I swear I got a different mandriva from everyone else when I click on about kde in konq it shows me the same as 11.1
Edit
Seems I have offered an update lets test this then…
One can obtain a live CD with openSUSE-11.1 and KDE-4.2.3 from here:
“KDE Four Live” CD](http://home.kde.org/~binner/kde-four-live/)
Or if one likes living on the real cutting edge, one can obtain a live CD with openSUSE-11.1 and KDE-4.3 (beta1) from here:
Index of /repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso
I’m not sure if that is what you are looking for. Nor do I have an idea as to how well KDE works on those live CDs … I’m still using KDE-3.5.10.
I reinstalled 11.1 using a reloaded 4.2.3 image, and everything works fine. KDE has really made a lot of improvements and is quite usable now. They may have won be back from Gnome. I also prefer it to the 4.2.2 Mandriva offers.
I am dual booting with (Chakra) it and I must say that I like it a lot! I think it is a definite second (after opensuse) favorite of mine. In a way they represent each other’s absolute opposites - opensuse with a great central management (YaST) and Arch/Chakra with its bare-bones (KISS-philosophy).
Unfortunately I have still not have had time to embrace KISS, but I hope to do so sometime.
I think it is only the chakra installer that is “alpha” really… when it is installed and set-up it turns into a standard Arch (+KDEmod) so if you just get it installed you can play along (I had zero problems…well…except for some GRUB issues).
I see that many points out Yast as if it is the main reason for openSUSE.
Since Webmin got out, YaST, MCC or any other are irrelevant, one get same configuration interface for any distro.
There’s gotta be something else, beyond YaST?!
Me? I just like openSUSE, no other reason whatsoever. I also dislike Ubuntu, no particular reason either…
Can’t explain, that is the way it is, same as we have different taste for food.
That’s me. I’m not a huge fan of Yast nor do I hate it. I just like openSuse. It feels right for me. Ubuntu doesn’t feel right. I can’t explain it either, but there it is.
I’ve used both Mandriva and OpenSUSE and like both of them.
I know the thread started out with the comparison between the two, but also see the comments on other things, and it does say to chit-chat about things, so I’ll mention other things.
One guy mentioned the LinuxQuestions.org website, and I became a member there as well, and there they do talk about different Linux Distros, including comparing different Distros, and also anything about Linux, so there’s a place you could ask general questions about Linux.
I won’t get too much into what I like and dislike about Mandriva and OpenSUSE specifically, or about what problems I have had with them specifically, because I have tried so many different versions of Linux, that if I started to talk about anything, I may actually end up talking about a completely different Linux Distribution than either Mandriva or OpenSUSE.
What I’ll do instead is “generalize” most things because if I start to talk about something in particular, and if I say it’s with Mandriva or OpenSUSE, someone may “correct” me to say that I was actually talking about Ubuntu or Kubuntu, etc.
I will say as far as Mandriva goes, that I have used/tried Mandriva Linux Spring 2007 Mini-Linux, Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring One Gnome, Mandriva Linux RC2 2008 (Which has a great Partitioner where I can make partitions of just about anything, like if I need to make a NTFS or Windows partition for example, so I like the partitioner in it), and Mandriva Linux 2009, which I used for quite a while.
Mandriva 2009 recently though showed that there is an upgrade available, 2009 Spring or whatever, but when I try to install it, it does say that it will take hours to download, as it’s something like 1.9 Gbs in file size, or something like that, but nothing happens when I try to upgrade. I enter the password and the screen goes White and does nothing for hours, and I even look at the lights on my Broadband DSL cable modem and there’s no activity, no lights flashing in other words, only on steady which is an indication that there’s no activity. Also, the HD light is off so no HD activity, except once in a while there was one flash here and there, which is the usual way it acts when I’m not trying to do anything extra.
I actually wonder whether the upgrade/update of the OS won’t actually be online until that one day they talk about, it sounded like they want to try an reach a record download on a certain day just like when they did it for Firefox3, which, by the way, is the first Firefox I really dislike and have had nothing but problems with crashes and lockups, Firefox closing all of a sudden three or more times per day, etc., so unless they “fix” those, I hope they don’t make us Linux users use FF3, because I’ll use another browser if that happens, unless they’ve made FF3 more stable than it was.
For me, for the most part, a few Linux Distros work fine, and the main parts for me are:
I like to be able to find the applications, without too much trouble, like a good Start Menu setup;
I’d like to be able to access the web, so a good browser;
Get the e-mail to work well, and I like Evolution for that, although there was one version of either Evolution or of a Linux version, I’m not sure which, where Evolution would open up almost like “Wide-Screen TV,” meaning that even using the highest 1280 x 1024 resolution that my monitor can use, Evolution would be “off the screen” to the left and right sides of the screen.
I couldn’t resize it down enough to see the whole thing, so when I needed to see the left side or end, I actually had to move the window over, and then the same to see the right side or end, but Evolution is working great for me right now, and I can see it all, and without reducing the text size so small on my 19-inch flat-panel monitor, that I’d practically need a magnifying glass to read it;
I like to be able to create, edit, etc., videos and movies, and maybe upload them to YouTube for example;
I like to be able to upload the videos and pictures from the camcorder and the digital camera, which I have done both of, although in Windows, since the Agfa EPhoto CL-18 camera was no longer supported for drivers after WIN-XP, not working in my WIN-Vista for example, I was glad to find out that the Linux driver(s) seem to work great for that camera, even better and easier than the Windows drivers in my opinion;
I sometimes would watch TV or listen to the radio on the computer, which is one thing that I’m trying to get to work in Linux now, so I’ve been trying to get that to work with little or no success yet.
It’s a Hauppauge PVR500, dual-receiver, which always shows as two PVR-150’s as far as identifying and getting a driver for, but I did get it to work using Kubuntu 7.10, then after a fresh install of that, an install over Kubuntu 7.10 of LinuxMCE, or it may have been LinuxMCE RC2, not sure anymore, but even though the operating system was ok, the “media center” of that was geared mostly for controlling your electronics in the house, like security cameras, lighting, etc., anyway, I am not really into that at this time, so I didn’t prefer to use that, and I didn’t seem to get it to work with Kubuntu 8.10 either, but LinuxMCE updates separately than using the Kubuntu updater.
Too long of a post here now so I’ll close by saying that I really am trying to decide between using Mandriva and OpenSUSE, which by the way I think my ISP is using, so if I continue to use OpenSUSE, I do have a “mirror” that actually has my ISP in it’s address to the mirror.
I’ll also say that I did try other OS’s as well, like Debian Alpha, Slackware 12.0, CentOS 5.0, etc., and have even tried one called something like Linux-XP, but that one didn’t seem to be too good for my purposes, but I don’t know whether it’s in it’s “infancy” so to speak, or not, but if the “XP” is supposed to be similar to WIN-XP, then maybe it’s just “getting off the ground” so to speak.
I actually liked the way that Solaris 10 looks, but the installation doesn’t seem to include a driver for my Ethernet card, so I’d need to download it, so I did try that, downloading the Ethernet and/or network driver(s) first, then I put it onto my external HD, but Solaris 10 has it’s own filing system, and it doesn’t seem capable of accessing other filing systems, like Mandriva and OpenSUSE can do, with the NTFS drive I have with my music, pictures and videos, so I “drifted away” from Solaris 10, but it also was a 32-bit installation, which “appeared” to switch my system over to 64-bit by the way it looked after rebooting.
OpenSolaris did work as far as accessing the Ethernet card and the Internet, but it couldn’t access the external HD, not even after making a back up of that drive, then doing a fresh OpenSolaris install, using the Solaris filing system, then putting the backed up copies back unto the internal hard drive, so I even left OpenSolaris because it still couldn’t access the external HD, even when the filing system had been switched over to the one Solaris uses.
So back to either Mandriva or OpenSUSE, but I won’t gripe or complain because no one needs to provide any operating system for us to use so I’m just happy that people care about these things and that there are any efforts at all to “help us out” along those lines.
I may post my minor problem talking about getting the PVR500 to work with Linux, but that of course isn’t done here, and I’ve looked and read about how to set it up to work, but nothing I’ve read about has worked for me, not even the 51 pages or so from the site that talks about getting IVTV or MYTHTV, which starts off with mythtv in it’s address, and includes wiki and Opensuse_10.3.
So a little later on I’ll maybe do some more searching for answers on that, but of course that’s not here so please don’t respond to that here.
Have a Great Day,
Bernard:)
Yup oldcpu, that’s what I was looking for.
I miss 10.3 a bit… just about everything I needed and tried worked well in that version. OpenSUSE 11 and KDE4 have some, well, growing pains. I guess.
Darkelve
Well, every one discuss alot about this b4 and now. Every one have their own choice. It depends on how you treat a system and how a distro treat your system.
I like both. I am using Mand 2009.1 on personal laptop and openSUSE 11.0 in office. Both are gr8 and well structured distros.
MCC and YAST are almost the same, the functionality is the same.
I think, Mand is more simple to use than openSUSE.
If some one didn’t tried Mand 2009.1, try it, as it is really worth to give it a try at least.
A little FYI…Mandy 2009 users are suppose to be getting KDE 4.2.3 soon. It is in Testing now. This according to their forums. 