Novell’s OpenSUSE, one of the Linux world’s most prominent distributions, hit Version 11.1 late in 2008, sporting a renewed focus on community involvement. Check out this slide show to see if the latest version of OpenSUSE has what it takes to win mind share from Canonical’s Ubuntu and Red Hat’s Fedora Linux distributions, and stay tuned for eWEEK Labs’ full review of OpenSUSE 11.1.
It will be interesting to see the review as Brooks complains about a lot in the slides.
I’m a new user of openSuse. In my three years of Linux this is my first time to really give Suse a honest try. In my opinion, Suse is so far ahead of Ubuntu and Fedora that it’s not even a race anymore. I can accomplish so much more in so little time.
The hard part for me was that I had used Debian based distros for much of the last three years and coming to Suse was almost like starting over again. I got really frustrated a time or two but I’m really glad I continued on.
Fedora is a very solid product but they seem to complicate things unnecessarily. Ubuntu badly needs some quality control. If you like to tinker, those two are the distros for you. If you want a solid desktop to get things done, Suse by a mile.
let’s just say that “your mileage may vary”, as they say. i have had the opposite experience when it comes to ubuntu. right now Ibex is running so perfect, i can’t imagine a better experience. but isn’t that what it’s all about? no distro will please everybody, and that’s a good thing. it creates healthy competition amongst the various distros.
no matter which distro becomes “big” really does not matter in the end, the bottom line is that it helps everyone when a newcomer gets involved.
my fav distros right now:
ubuntu/debian
mandriva
puppy
opensuse
anything else is just for playing around.
i do agree with you on the fedora thing though. i had the most god awful experience with it. i have the most generic rig you can imagine, and every distro works pretty well on my equipment. so i know it wasn’t my hardware. i won’t be trying fedora again for a while. peace.
This reminds me of “car wars.” Ian Flemming, who always put James Bond in the fanciest of cars, said all he cared about in a car was that “it started first thing on a cold morning and shortly thereafter was doing 100 m.p.h.”
A distro should start up with no problems and run fast. Everything else is just “trim” and so subjective that it barely matters. My “trim level” for linux is KDE 4.2. So, when I saw the slides in the review, I barely recognized it as suse. To me, gnome looks like it was drawn with crayons by people that can’t be trusted with sharp instruments like pencils.
Ego makes me want to see that “my distro” is recognized as one of the top distros. But the truth is, any distro that works for you and makes you happy is a good distro. I think there is room for all to succeed, be ubuntu, suse, puppy, kde, gnome or xfce.
It’s funny all the GUI is a must and unaceptableness of CLI then you see something like :
sudo zypper install gimp
And have it rated as simpler How & why ppl are confused, when GNOME has a way of doing something, then YaST has to in it’s configuration, I do not understand. What do they expect, if there’s multiple UIs? Just turn off that bit from GNOME, another bit of functionality going missing, will be in spirit of the system.
this always bothered me as well, each distro, plus each de/wm has a different way of doing packages and everything, so to remember the steps it gets alot more confusing (atleast alot more than zypper install X, apt-get install x, yum install x). but whenever theres a site telling you how to do an install of some app its always like “install miro THE EASY WAY” and then it gives you a 10-15 step process involving a gui. when you can make it a 3 step process (open terminal, sudo zypper in miro, let it finish and use it).
Many people come from very gui-centric backgrounds, and are deathly afraid of the command line. I admit that when I first started using Linux, I was a bit hesitant as well. There were a few tasks in Windows, however, that I had already learned were simpler from the cli, and that gave me a bit of confidence to try the command line. I now administer my parents’ computer from halfway across the country, and the cli is almost always simpler and faster.
I sometimes have to wonder at the level of experience of some of these reviewers. How often do you ever see a comment about how easy it was to setup a server, or to remotely administer, or anything else that does more than barely scratch the surface?
Maybe I’m just going off topic on my own little rave…If so, I apologize.
And I’m exactly the opposite. I started out with MS-DOS 1.0 on a Zenith Z-100.
Don’t be surprised if old-timers like me prefer the GUI, having gotten used to it. It’s not a matter of being scared, it’s a simple matter of productivity. If I’m just copying an entire directory, sure, “cp” at the CLI is quicker. But if it’s a detailed copy, where (for example) I want all .MP3’s but two or three (and the names are all different, so a regular expression won’t cover it), I can do it much faster in Konqueror.
(Yes, I have raced old timers who were using the CLI and I have won. Take THAT, you CLI-lovers! )
Having built too many packages from source to count, I vastly prefer a package manager. Let that thing worry about the headaches; I have work to do.
Finally, there are the obvious examples: WYSIWYG word processing is rather clunky at the CLI. Web browsing is even clunkier. I frankly wonder about the sanity of those who try it. (But that’s just me.)
Ergo: don’t just assume that people always use the GUI because they’re “scared of the CLI.” That’s just no true. I have seen the GUI, I have used the GUI, and I prefer it hands down.
I’m with you. The weakest part of my computer skill is typing. But I can click pretty good though.
I got excited about tablet pc’s because I could write and let the computer type it into the word processor. Some people said the handwriting interpreter was too error prone. And it was true that I got to only about 80% accuracy with handwriting recognition. But my typing was barely 60% accurate! :shame:
I’m becoming a zypper fan, but here is a single line from a good how-to that gets your multimedia working:
My chances of getting that typed right, as they say in the calculus, approach zero. And to be honest, copy and paste is more of a gui trick than a cli option.
openSUSE takes on Ubuntu and Fedora? Sorry if this sounds like flame-bait, but the only times there’s even discussion of which one being better is when Gnome is the focus. From the command line (with the exception of package manager syntax), Linux is Linux, so that’s pretty much moot. And from a KDE-user’s perspective, it’s no contest. openSUSE is the only one of the three that seems to actually care about KDE.
I know, that sounds kinda back-handed toward openSUSE. But it’s meant to be more of an observation on the other two. KDE feels like an afterthought, at best, with the other two. And nothing against Gnome, but it’s just not for me.
I listen other people they saying Ubuntu has nothing to offer,Fedora have few thing to offer and Ill tell you OpenSuse got more to offer then any other Linux OS. Myself I have 50% of luck to solve the easy stuff,when it goes above it no way. Novell works hard and always something new in every version not like the others (Mandriva,ubuntu....). Look what Novell archived far better then other OS system Im talking Microsoft and other linux.
My last post was a bit of a misnomer, since I love a nice gui and, like yourself, find some tasks faster. Use the tool that works best for you for the situation, right?
I was making a broad generalization based on my own interaction with users new to Linux, and those who perceive the command line as as block to even trying Linux.
It seems rather silly to be discussing/debating which linux distro is better than the next. Each has strong points and weak points, and everyone has their preferences, but they are all Linux. It would be far more productive to discuss how to get those icky windows machines running Linux, no matter which distro. Just my two cents.
Oh, I agree with that, of course. And speaking as a GUI-lover, it annoys me endlessly when I see something at Freshmeat or Slashdot that claims to be a “GUI Front End for [whatever]!” You take the time to download it, install it, get it configured and all that … . … … only to discover that it’s basically just a text-mode interface that has been moved into a GUI. In other words, you’re still entering exactly the same stuff, but now you’re typing it into a text box in a dialog instead of at a CLI prompt. What’s the point? :sarcastic:
I think that’s worth considerably more than two cents. Another side of that coin is that the enterprise Linux distros seem far more interested in stealing established Unix business, rather than in going after (and even converting) existing Windows business. Sometimes their advertising even comes right out and says this.
Having been a Linux user for nearly 10 years, I have tried quite a few distros, Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, Mint, Slackware, Ubuntu Kubuntu. Debian was my favourite, leaving it and, especially, Apt behind was a wrench, But it was too easy to break, Not Debian’s fault, just my cack handedness, I just have to fiddle, especially at 3 in the morning after too many rums. Open suse is the distro I have stuck with since v 10.3 and have been really happy with. Even with that I have been through dramas, (who was it that broke the wireless light on my Thinkpad?). So I would have to say that I have tried a lot and finally come to the best (for my purposes anyway).
That’s true, but yet another side of the coin (crikey… this coin’s starting to look a little funny :)) is that fierce internecine competition plays to linux’s greatest strength - its capacity for variation and evolution.
Personally, I think as long as the distros aren’t swallowing one another (and the GPL seems very well designed to prevent that), trying to ‘steal’ one another’s best selling points, and market, is a large part of what it should be all about.
