Where is OpenSuse headed??

English Open Chat
1

I’ve been using Suse since around 1997 and the things I’ve always like most are it’s speed and weight. Recently, I tried to do an install on a PIII laptop and after a (very long) time, I just gave up as OpenSuse has scaled up and become very resource hungry.

I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it does concern me. One of the biggest failures of V*sta was that it was so bloated that it could not perform well on older hardware. W7 in contrast runs much faster on a wider array of hardware and in performance and stability even outpaces many Linux distros.

This post is mainly a cautionary tale but I would like to hear from others who think OpenSuse is losing it’s edge due to weight… or not.

2

I have SUSE running on an Athlon Thunderbird (950 MHz) and it has no probs at all. The machine has only 768 MB

if you have enough RAM, then it shouldn’t be a problem, though a slow processor, of course, will make the system feel a bit “lazy”

3

I have mixed feelings about this. I agree that bloated software is a Bad Thing™, generally speaking; but on the other hand, I realize that things change. If you really want a lightweight, minimal OS, there are other choices. OpenSUSE is what it is. It targets the largest number of users – most of whom are running better than a PIII now.

When I first tried Windows 3 many years ago, I was struck by the bloat. I hardly used it and spent most of my time in DOS. But I also realized that one reason for that bloat was the online help, which (even in Windows 3) was amazing. In any application, at any point, I could hit “F1” and context-sensitive help would come up. Later versions expanded that even further, with pop-up “text tips” and the (in)famous “?” button that let you get specific help on the selections in a dialog box.

All of these things take resources. LOTS of resources. I remember at the time writing a little package on contract for a company; the program was less than 500K, but the online help topped out at several megabytes. The ratio was astonishing.

Nowadays, if you’re going to attract the masses (an important distinction) to your distribution, they’ll expect it to support

  • multimedia
  • interoperability with Windows machines (ex., Samba)
  • printing without hassles
  • their scanner, their smart phone, etc., you name it.

All of this adds bloat. Just the ability to detect all common hardware, rather than requiring the user to manually config and install the needed drivers, takes a TON of support code. One reason why Ubuntu remains more popular with The Masses™ is because it makes some of these steps even easier – at the cost of even more bloat. OpenSUSE seems to strike a middle ground.

The way I look at it, some of this is inevitable. I recently upgraded to an AMD x64x2 chip with 4Gig of RAM just to get more speed, when a couple of years ago, a 1.3Ghz Thunderbird with 1 Gig was a gracious plenty. I shrug my shoulders at that.

If Suse stops supporting the latest hardware, gadgets, buzzers and whistles, they’re going to lose share to those distros that have them. People complain about bloat, but they complain even more about missing features. Every distro has to compromise at some point. All in all, I think OpenSUSE offers the best compromise for me, which is why I prefer it.

4

There are plenty of small form linuxes for old machines, I heard all good things about antix and tiny core.

5

openSUSE has grown and it IS more difficult to get running on old relatively minimal CDs.

Typically, for an old PC I do not recommend openSUSE, despite my being a big openSUSE fan. Still, if you do wish to try openSUSE on such an older PC, there are a couple of ways you can try this. The openSUSE community of created a couple of “light weight” desktop liveCDs (as KDE , Gnome, and indeed even xfce are too heavy for older PCs). Its not clear to me from reading your post if you even tried the light weight openSUSE implementations?

Take a look at:

You may find installation a bit tricky, as that is where a lot of memory can be used. But typically, there are work arounds. One way is in the initial green menu is to select F3 and choose a text install. Another way is to choose a text boot to run level 3 (ie a terminal/text login with networking), and then when in run level 3 type ‘su’ to get root (password will be <enter> for LXDE and “soad” (no quotes) for SOAD) and then run yast, and under misc choose the installation option in YaST.

Both those liveCDs are for openSUSE-11.1 as the openSUSE community have not yet created an 11.2 version. There is a wiki page here which keeps track of the openSUSE liveCDs: Live CD - openSUSE. SuSE Studio for 11.2 was just released a few days ago, which suggests there is a reasonable possibility in a few weeks we may see an 11.2 version of LXDE.

6

@smpoole and oldcpu: thkx for some quality reading, excellent posts.

7

Also, have a look at Welcome – SUSE Studio
You can create your own customized (and lightweight) openSUSE flavors.
I use it for some of my netbooks.

8

Into a brighter future - once we get rid of 3.5 and GNOME, there is no stopping us! Muha-ha-haaa!

9

Running oS 11.1 on 240MiB laptop with KDE4.3 isn’t realistically useable. Even pairing down uncessary memory consuming things like kupdaterapplet and daemons.

Switching to icewm, does improve things, but Firefox 3 is still too fat, I found arora more comfortable. The machine is however operating smoother and faster than Windows XP SP3 is on the same hardware. I do not think that openSUSE has become especially bloated, looking at true running memory consumption.

In general, todays Web tends to need much more memory than in past. Whilst installing (particularly if you use text mode) is perfectly possible with 240MiB RAM, really the minimum requirement for comfortable desktop of 512MiB does make sense.

Some of the comments about bloat, seem to confuse space used on disk, with actual resident set size in RAM. A help system that uses signifcantly more RAM than a typical desktop application for example is entirely broken. Especially if it consumes resources without the user even using it.

A problem with performance, is simply things that are convenient for most systems, need to be disabled on a thin system. After installation, on first boot particularly there are issues with heavy memory consumption by background jobs, and desktop.

A lesser issue, is simply that the kernel & software is tuned for processors, with bigger cache sizes these days.

I have speculated about an oS-lite architecture, a spin on standard release aimed at machines with less RAM. But I’m not convinced how widely used it would be, or if it would attract config contributions and testing, that would be needed to make the effort worthwhile.

At the end of the day, extending most machines to 512MiB RAM is a better solution, and new PCs are becoming so low price (likely soon entirely free) that keeping old PII type machines, or poorly specified laptops as desktops seems less and less interesting.

10

You should try Opera 10.10 on it Rob, it’s pretty lightweight and ridicilously fast when compared to Firefox on Linux.

11

Even though there are problems with some sites, Chromium is my default browser now.

12

Chromium has been failing on more sites for me recenty, probably just because I have been using different sites, the outcome of which is, I’ve gone back to using Firefox, until Chromium can handle more than half of my daily browsing without displaying a warning, displaying a blank window or crashing.

I will keep Chromium installed and use it sometimes, as it’s so much faster than Firefox, but I can’t use it for everything.

Regards,
Barry.

13

Opera I tried in past, it has problems for me :

  1. non-OSS
  2. dubious security (A LUG chairmen I know was pwned thanks to Opera)
  3. I didn’t like the UI, nor find it any faster as it’s advocates claimed
  4. Objectionable mindlessly distracting adverts and wasted screen space

Opera may be a better browser now, but I’d really rather exhaust FOSS alternatives before I resort to closed. In general the community developed things, then to be more aligned with my interests, rather than the company hawking the browser.

14

Rob@opensuse:

Another thought after another swallow of coffee.

It would help, too, if we were to precisely define what “bloat” is. Some people use that term to complain of a 4.6 Gigabyte install DVD when only 1-2 Gig of it might be used in most cases. :slight_smile:

15

@smpoole7

Well things that are easily deselected during install are not sane to count in “bloat”. Nor features that are easy to turn off.

Really it’s how much of an application tends to sit in RAM that matters most rather than the disk space used, and how much processing is done.

I suspect fair amounts of the DVD are rarely installed, and a smaller install DVD, backed up by online repo, actually would meet my needs better (shorten download times). But some do not have a good Internet connection, and use box set, they may miss critical applications.

16

My mistake. … I see SOAD is avaliable for 11.2 from this news release:
SOAD : Enlightenment-LiveCD

17

I run openSUSE only on netbooks…my slowest hardware is a via 1200mhz cpu and it works great…11.1 had a performance problem with KDE 4, but i think it was a KDE 4 problem because the newer versions are running faster…

18

Thanks for your responses. I agree with 99% of your comments particularly regarding helpware and mass appeal. All of these things are necessary to attract a larger user base and keep pace with innovation. Regarding memory resident code versus on-disk bloat, I don’t think storage based bloat is a huge issue and agree that RAM usage is the real issue. Where I lose my faith is the point at which we start to think that 512MB of ram is reasonable.

I have an i7 920 with 12GB ram, Q6600 with 8GB ram and several others (all OpenSuse except for my 1 Puppy Linux laptop… the P3) but by far my favorite is my MyTouch 3g with 192MB RAM and Android Linux.

My point is: There isn’t a whole lot a smartphone can’t do given it’s meager resources yet on the desktop, we seem to be headed the wrong way and given the trend towards smartphones and netbooks, our beloved OpenSuse could become an endangered species if it’s not kept small and lite (OpenSuse Lite… bring back the 80’s).

Again, I appreciate the discussion and remain a devoted OpenSuse fanboy.

19

I don’t think it’s fair to compare a mainstream Linux OS like SUSE to a Linux distro which is specifically built and optimized for Smartphones/nettops and what not which usually have limited resources, both on RAM and CPU power. And there are a lot of things where smartphones & co are not suited for, ie heavy multimedia encoding, databases, webservers, other heavy applications, etc. 512 MB is actually a good minimum these days for a mainstream general Linux OS distro like SUSE and similar (Fedora, Debian, etc)

SUSE is a distro which aims both at normal desktops AND servers :wink:

20

I think over time your P3 laptop will be useless, just like your
refrigerator. Time to upgrade.