I’m thinking of trying suse as a change from ubuntu. What advantages does suse have over ubuntu? How often is a new version released. How easy is it to find packages and to install them?
Thanks
openSUSE 11.2 is current version, 11.3 is available for testing
I believe the release cycle is 8 month’s but I could be wrong.
YAST (Yet Another System Tool) handles most everything from software management to networking to hardware and more.
zypper also can be used in a terminal to manage software.
I think you’ll find YAST fairly painless to access the huge variety of packages available. The base 3 repositories plus the packman one will handle virtually all most will need and it is simple to add additional ones but remember to deactivate them after you fetched what you need to add because these other ones may contain older versions of software that may break your system during an update if you leave them active.
Both gnome and KDE desktops are fairly stable and IMHO much better to work with than Ubuntu.
Greetings & welcome, jf812!
Should answer (or at least give you a good idea to) your questions!
openSUSE 11.2 Beginner’s Guide
Remember, information is worthless unless its shared with someone and more its shared the greater its worth. Tell a friend! (I just made that up!)
Some of my thoughts;
- openSUSE is released every 8 months, instead of the 6 months
- OpenSUSE comes in a LiveCD or DVD which allows you to install any and just what you want to have installed instead of forcing you to accept their LiveCD image and then having to tweak it to your liking
- OpenSUSE uses KDE as the default and it seems more work/ R&D / support is on the KDE side over Gnome (plus the Gnome has some “interesting” hacks which I don’t 100% like)
- OpenSUSE includes Yast (Yet Another System Tool) for managing system settings and configuration
- OpenSUSE is involved heavily with the KDE project and are influential. The “slab” menu that is in KDE 4 was actually available in KDE 3.5 in openSUSE before 4.0 even came out
- The forum isn’t overcrowded so you have to keep bumping your thread until somebody notices your question
- The knowledge you learn with openSUSE could be transferred to SLED/SLES which is used in many corporations
- If you are into Mono, you can get more up-to-date version. At the same time if you are using KDE then you are not getting Mono shoved down your throat!
*]OpenSUSE has a lot of potential for individuals to get involved
And the people on the forums are very friendly.
On 14/04/10 10:46, jf812 wrote:
> I’m thinking of trying suse as a change from ubuntu.
Welcome to our coven.
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Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman not newsboy
“I wear the cheese. It does not wear me.”
It’s better to talk about differences than advantages.
OpenSUSE is more focused on a small base repository and large and easily accessible and manageable community repositories. The most important are perhaps packman (especially for multimedia) and the repositories from ati and nvidia for the proprietary graphics drivers. Most other community repositories are organized in the “OpenSUSE Build Service”, which is an infrastructure sponsored by Novell where packagers can easily manage and distribute packages and repositories for different Versions and even distributions. While most people suggest newcomers should stay with only the most important repositories, the package management is the most powerful I have seen yet in any distribution, and when you organize your repositories well, you won’t get into trouble even when having many repositories enabled and conflicting packages in the repositories. You can also easily, for example, activate development repositories for KDE and then switch KDE packages to them and later turn back to the base repository. Everything from the gui package manager, of course (at least, in the qt version)!
YaST is another(well, not really another, because the gui package manager is part of it) important feature of OpenSUSE. You can basically configure everything you need in this one tool. It’s in some cases a little bit unintuive in my opinion, but whenever I see questions about how to configure this, how to configure that from users of other distributions, I relize, that the configuration is just a mouseclick away in openSUSE.
Also the installer (on the DVD version) gives you much more options and possibilities.
To say it in one sentence, my opinion: Ubuntu works better out of the box in some cases and many things are more simple, while openSUSE helps you in making your system work and things are more powerful.
What hacks do you mean? something dirty under the hood, or the general modifications, like the slab menu? I like the Gnome version of openSUSE so far.
You mean the Kickoff-menu, slab is Gnome.