Why I think openSuse 11.3 is awesome

English Open Chat
#1

I’ve been a linux user on and off since Suse Pro 9.3 (I actually paid for the boxed version). And I’ve used a lot of distros (Arch, Debian Stable and Testing, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, PC-BSD, the list can go on)

Arch I just did not like, after hours of work I finally got it running and then had to work build packagess that was a no go. Plus a good number of the users have that “my distro is the 1337” child mentality

Debian I really enjoyed Debian, but it is starting to feel like a slowly sinking ship and that will be a shame.

Ubuntu is alright it just never felt polished to me, and it comes with a lot of stupid software that I have no need for, the minimal install failed several times.

PCLinuxOS is alright but it being a 32bit distro didn’t work for my ram

PC-BSD was pretty cool I run my media server on it but I didn’t like it for my laptop.

And back to (open)Suse.

At first I was a bit nervous my last experience (10.1) was really poor, and sluggish. I first installed 11.3 in a vm to ensure it would work as I wanted. It worked great so I plunged head first.

I must say opensuse so far has been the most professional looking. Being a long time gnome user I wasn’t sure about KDE, but Suse is known for its KDE so I went ahead and installed it. Its snappy, clean, does not seem to come with to much extra junk software. Its rock stable, the default background is amazing (and not brown)

Multimedia was a breeze (ubuntu was slightly easier) nvidia and broadcom setup a breeze. Pulling 3rd party repos was a breeze (Yast did it automatically for me)

Overall I have to say despite the doom sayers crying over Novell and Microsofts deal I am really impressed with the amount of work that went into opensuse

#2

Welcome back, glad you are enjoying it. :slight_smile:

#3

Welcome. You are seeing the results of all the hard work to shift openSUSE to become a fully KDE4 (as well as Gnome and LXDE) distro and I definitely think it has paid off.

#4

I started using Linux when a friend and myself went ‘halfsies’ and purchased Suse 9.1 Personal. We both installed it onto our computers, and I really liked it. Unfortunately, I was on dial-up and I couldn’t get connected to the internet for the life of me. So, back to Windows I went. Later on, when I got a high-speed connection I downloaded Ubuntu 5.10 and gave it a spin; I used that for a couple of years. Around 2007 I went distro-hopping again and found openSUSE 10.3 and PCLinuxOS 2007, both of which I really loved. I can never seem to keep an OS installed onto my machine for very long, as I like trying new things. However, this past week has been tough for me, as I keep switching back and forth between openSUSE 11.3 and PCLinuxOS 2010. I can’t decide which one I like more, and I don’t like dual-booting. Both feel like home, and both are awesome distros (IMO anyway). I needed to keep things simple and not flip-flop back and forth so much, so I asked my wife which one I should use full time. She chose openSUSE for me.

#5

Your story sounds a lot like mine…I have a very strong feeling this is the distro that will stay on my netbook for the duration. I don’t even like calling it a ‘distro’ anymore…it’s more like ‘my OS’ :wink: