I am new on this forum and I would need your advice on opensuse before I install it. Here’s the pitch: I need to install a linux distribution on my pc at work (I’ve just change to another company and they put windows 7 on my pc, eeek). At home I use Ubuntu (with gnome 2 environment). I do not want to install Ubuntu again because now it is unity and gnome 3 as standard. So I feel a little bit abandoned, and I am looking for another distribution. So why not openSuSe ?
I have several questions about it:
does the rpm architecture differ totally from the deb on ? For me that has only work with ubuntu, will I be totally lost or does it change very much for a basic use ?
as I really do not like unity or gnome 3, I thought about using kde… is this true that opensuse has the best integration of kde ?
a friend of mine told me that opensuse what the “less opensource distribution ever, with the less active community”. What do you think about this statement (except the fact this is a troll
Yes, Some of us are struggling with Gnome 3. I tried it and just couldn’t get my head around it. Just like we struggled with the transitiion from KDE3 to KDE4 a couple of years ago.
RPMs versus deb packages: There’s a very sophisticated and very user friendly GUI interface for installing RPMs in the YAST management system (YAST = Yet Another Syetem Tuner). It’s not a puzzle. And we have some very switched on folks here yo help you with any stumbles you might encounter. I had no trouble with the Ubuntu package system and I found th YAST RPM system equally easy to use, couldn’t really say which is better except perhaps the YAST software module in KDE openSUSE is IMHO much more informative.
Yes it is true that openSUSE has the best integration of KDE. I’ve tried KDE in the “big” distros and the effort that Novell put into KDE in openSUSE all those years really shows.
a friend of mine told me that opensuse what the “less opensource distribution ever, with the less active community”. What do you think about this statement (except the fact this is a troll
Actually, I think Ubuntu is the leader in using closed source software/drivers. It’s a real world and we have to use Nvidia and ATI drivers and many, many non-opensource softwares, just like Ubuntu and Debian, but unlike Ubuntu we’re not so overt about it.
Regarding the “less active community”: Ubuntu is the biggest Linux distro by a country mile! So the community is much more numerous than those in the other distros. However I’ve noticed that (for example) the quality of the advice in the forums of openSUSE, objectively speaking, is an order of magnitude better than the advice that’s delivered in the Ubuntu forums. There’s some utter rubbish delivered as advice in the Ubuntu forums (and some very good advice too of course) whereas here the folks are all pretty switched on.
O, yes, some administrative ones:
. Please try to understand which (sub)forum is the best to start your thread. You started this one in Unreviewed Howtos, which is the place where people post there Howtos to help others. Your thread is a question, not a Howto by any means. Thus some friendly guy moved it to Looking for something other the Support.
. And that brings us to the next one. You posted this in the German part also (albeith in German of course). And aagain they are hesitating if they should move it to the correct (sub)forum.
We are all volunteers here and when you put your question in the right (sub)forum, not only will you then have the best audience for it (because not all people search all forums for threads where they can give a usefull answer), but you also keep the amount of work to be done by the mods down.
On this trolling remarks: it is a fact that openSUSE’s Build Service allows you to built packages for Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian etc. That’s what I call a direct proof of an active community, that shows it’s capability to look beyond it’s own circles.
I hung around in the Ubuntu forums some years ago. I feel the same about the quality of support as @swerdna, adding that I find the atmosphere in the openSUSE forums much friendlier, more open.
I actually think that the openSUSE community is better than the Ubuntu and Fedora communities. The people in the community tend to be very helpful and friendly. What I really enjoy about the openSUSE build service and the community is how low the barrier to entry is to becoming a developer. I had an issue with a program I was trying to use because in openSUSE python-qt4 was built without phonon support. I figured out how to fix it by manually building my own RPM and when I submitted my solution to the bug a developer encouraged me to submit the fix so I could get credit. I tried packaging that program based on the Fedora RPM SPEC. I gave up on it and a few months latter someone else fixed up the Spec and got it to build. Since then I’ve become a maintainer of the package, and I recently submitted it to Factory for inclusion in openSUSE 12.2. From what I’ve heard in order to become a Fedora developer you have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to prove your worthiness. In openSUSE users are actually encouraged to do development and the workflow in OBS makes it possible to maintain quality while allowing for anyone to participate. The guys in the IRC channels have always been pretty helpful to me.
The package that I maintain is url=http://www.openlp.org. It’s a program that projects song lyrics for church worship services and can also handle multimedia files and Powerpoint/Impress presentations.
Hey mate, Question 1. I used Debian for quite a while, and i don’t know your desires with a distro, but i found with Debian, dpkg/apt/aptitude limit the flexibility you have with packages. Opensuse is the first rpm distro i’ve used, and after using it, i will never go back to using a .deb based distro. zypper, (opensuse equivalent to apt-get) if it has issues solving dependencies, it will give you the choice of what to do including ignoring dependencies. This may not sound like much to rave on about, but it really is great, compare it with the alternative Debian scenario where it has issues solving dependencies and solves them by coming up with a list that inevitably involves it removing many many things that would be undesired. The zypper way allows for flexibility. Not always are dependencies needed, and sometimes, simply ignoring it and then fixing the issue manually is the best way. You may have never experiences such an issue, but i mix repos.
Question 2. It is often stated that Opensuse does the best implementation of kde. This really is a hard question to answer. What you think determines something to be the best is entirely up to you. I read an article by the Kubuntu team one time that showed obvious envy of Opensuse’s reputation. I do not like Ubuntu, i think it is a very buggy distro, and Kubuntu is unfortunate to be part of Ubuntu, and thus inherit the same buggyness; this is the one thing i hate about Kubuntu, and the Kubuntu team probably hate the catch22 situation they’re in. I find Opensuse to be a stable distribution, and while i prefer a more vanilla approach, Opensuse do change things, names for different pieces of software (‘systemsettings’ is nicknamed ‘configure desktop’ for an example) is one thing; but i do find there implementation of kde to be one of, if not the best kde.
Question3. I can’t comment on this, as i haven’t done enough research, but the community ain’t bad, i’ve got an answer to every one of my questions, and i try to help people when i can.
