Why I use openSUSE

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Why do I use openSUSE?

I have come and gone from using Linux. Back in the days of Windows 95-98, I had almost completly switched over to linux, XP kept me in the windows camp for a while as while it was not ideal, I didn’t want to mess too much with my computer (And all that data transfers in moving) finally, Vista came about, and the movement back to Linux recommenced. However, this does not answer “Why I use openSUSE”

I have tried a number of flavors. Slackware, which my brother uses, is a bit too technical for my tastes, and when I started to go back to linux, I looked strongly at a number of distros. Debian, ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora. There are plenty of other ditros, but I wanted a “mainstream” distro that has a strong community. I looked over all of them, and slowly weeded them out.

Debian is great, non-profit, all open source. (And I might try it out as they have the new 5.0 out) however while I love open source software, I am not married to it. If a open-source software is equal to a commerical product, then by all means I am going to use the open source product, but in some cases, debian being zelots make a very pure, but not the best one. This is in no way belittling Debian, if I was to give a grant to any open source group, Debian would be it.

Then there is Fedora, which is not bad, but for no falt of its own, it didn’t WOW me.

so like many users, I came down to ubuntu and SUSE. Ubuntu is a nice product, a very slick product, and I might recommend it to some users. However, for me SUSE had a number of advantages.

It might be just how I use the desktop, but I prefer the KDE to GNOME. KDE suite of programs works better for me, and its setup is quite good. SUSE has a much better KDE then Kbuntu.

YAST - YAST is a wonderful tool, and is one of the biggest selling points of SUSE. one click installs are a great creature confort. I would use linux if there wasn’t a easy one click install, but the benfit of one click install is very nice. The other thing is if you need to look under the hood, you can, if you just want to put it on automatic, it will work, while other tools have a tendicy of installing stuff without going over what they are installing, or assuming your know a fair amount about the UNIX/LINUX background.

Fianlly, Green is cool.

Not saying I am wedded to SUSE, I may very well try out Debian sometime, but SUSE makes a well intergrated package that works. Thus, I chose SUSE.

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[QUOTE=DistortedHumor;2009661]Why do I use openSUSE?
YAST - YAST is a wonderful tool, and is one of the biggest selling points of SUSE. one click installs are a great creature confort. I would use linux if there wasn’t a easy one click install, but the benfit of one click install is very nice. The other thing is if you need to look under the hood, you can, if you just want to put it on automatic, it will work, while other tools have a tendicy of installing stuff without going over what they are installing, or assuming your know a fair amount about the UNIX/LINUX background.

Fianlly, Green is cool.

QUOTE]

YAST is definately what sold me on Suse. Of all the distros out there…YAST equates best to the windows control panel…lets face it…the grand majority of new users come from windows with its control panel…pretty much a one stop shop for system administration…YAST lets users ease into linux system administration and is a little less of a shock since they have a familiar frame of reference.

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What’s really cool in the upcoming yast, openSUSE 11.2, is how insanely fast it is. I had to double check that I was running yast :wink: Plus they are also creating yast web. Its a web interface to yast. Last time I played with it I was able to connect to multiple machines from one interface. I’m not sure though it made the cut.

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Thanks for sharing. It’s good to read that kind of stuff.

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Kim (7/9/2009 5:44:10 AM Mountain)

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It is great to hear storie such as this i have been using SUSE since version 7.0 and i too have tried others but the support and the community have kept me glued to the best distro out of all of them and i want to take this chance to say keep up the great work everyone who helps and makes this the best forum in the world as far as i am concerned!!!

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As for me, it’s a long story. I try to tell it short.

My first computer was an Intertec Superbrain. Two Z80 processors with CP/M 2.2. That was 1979 or 1980, when I remember it right. Anyway, I got used to have a real Operating System, when others still had a thing called “monitor”. Then came the IBM PC. MS-DOS never made me happy but it was a new experience, to have free slots to fix additional hardware in. I soldered a card from a kit with the T800 processor running Helios OS (still on the IBM PC). This was a flavor of Unix capable to run parallel processing.

The natural step was to try Minix and shortly after this came my first install of SuSE. It was something like 1.0.7 if I remember that right. I got used to the SuSE way of doing things and I never regretted to have kept it as my distro.

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Well despite my current hopper status right now I think OpenSuse and Ubuntu are going to be my mainstays until something else comes to my attention.

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Why I use it? Personally, I find SUSE to provide the best balance between a developer station, desktop OS and server. Also we heavily use SUSE on servers at work. Development at work is mostly done on SUSE and Debian systems, though we’re thinking of also adding Gentoo into the mix. No, we’ll probably won’t add Ubuntu as my company does not target desktop Linux but industrial embedded systems (running on Xilinx Virtex, ARM, MIPS, IA32, etc) so Ubuntu has nothing to do here :stuck_out_tongue: