Have been using OpenSUSE for about one day now, and wanted to share some thoughts. If you are not intrested in a somewhat meaningless post, stop reading now
My background
I used GNU/Linux for the first time 12-13 years ago. I was a “tech savvy” kid, and wanted to try something new. The following years I lost track of how many distributions I tried. I wanted to be “cool” and at one point I even used OpenBSD with ratpoison as window manager on my desktop computer. Around 2002-2003 something happened. My home server died, and I never took the time to fix it. I also started using Windows on my desktop to make my school life easier. And from there, it was only Windows once again.
What I was looking for
At last I decided to once again switch back to the world of GNU/Linux. This time I wanted something that just worked, and was visually appealing. I realized that coolness doesn’t mean usability, and I decided to try something that I before ranted for being “bloated”.
First impressions
Got to say that so far I’m satisfied. The stability, reliability and hardware support in the world of Linux has improved a lot since I was gone. Installation was a blast, KDE is visually appealing (even though we don’t agree on everything yet). I spent some time playing with CompizFusion just for the fun, after I with almost no problem at all got my ATI card running (I remember using ATI back in the days. The framerate didn’t compare at all with nvidia) (and another note: the ATI how-to on the wiki needs updating). OpenOffice.org and Firefox was stuff I already used in the windows world, and I even got my favourite Windows game running in no time.
I don’t really know what I wanted to say with this post. Just that OpenSUSE seems promising. Even for a former minimalist fanatic like me.
Glad to read you have a good feeling about openSUSE.
Needless to say, I’m an openSUSE fan, having used it for a number of years. But I do note openSUSE’s policy and implementation wrt not including proprietary drivers, nor proprietary codecs, and its willingness to install the latest desktops, together with a lot of FUD about openSUSE’s software package management (where most of the critic’s software management views are wrong/out of date) has given some users who have tried openSUSE second thought.
I happen to agree with the approach wrt free open source software (without getting into debating the reasons why the approch is in place), but I do note not everyone understands, nor likes, the approach.
I have no problem with openSUSE’s proprietary driver approach, nor the codec approach, nor indeed do I have softare package management problems, but to some extent my lack of problems is because I am reasonably familiar with the implementation in openSUSE.
I find openSUSE a distribution that the more I use, the more I like. And the more I use, the more willing I am to contribute to the development process with the milestone/Release-Candidate testing, to ensure the features that I want either work properly, or have bug reports written against anomalous functionality.
Anyway, … WELCOME to our forum, and WELCOME to openSUSE.
Personally, I love xmonad for its configurability and speed. It’s really great for a netbook, and can be run as part of a full fledged desktop environment, or as an alternative selected at log in when you want to run something resource intensive.
Oh, thanks for the tip. I will surely give it a try… someday. Right now I’m satisfied with having everything running (almost) out of the box. And I’m getting more used to KDE 4.3, heh.
