Opensuse has recently released its newest version in its line of Linux operating systems. I have had a few run-ins with Suse in the past at much earlier release dates. 12.3 has gotten a lot of publicity for how well put together it is, which is one reason I was left so gravely disappointed after using it. In this review I am going to try to look at the good of Opensuse, since some of the problems I experienced only apply to those with certain hardware conditions, but there is also some bad to sift through.
The Desktop
One nice thing about OpenSuse is the KDE setup it comes with by default. They've put a lot of effort into making both the animations that are enabled and the themes that are applied visually pleasing (if you happen to like green). Although it is good looking, it is not as functional as you may want it to be. It ships with KDE 4.9, but that can be updated immediately by switching to Tumbleweed (the rolling release system for Opensuse). Similar effort is applied to the Gnome Opensuse flavor, but not to the XFCE, which was disappointing. Their XFCE .iso comes with some bland defaults with light branding. It's really nothing to right home about.
The Applications
The default applications are more-or-less standard. Libreoffice, your DE tools, Firefox, Vim (I was happy to see that) etc. Gimp is not included. One application that always gets coverage in Opensuse reviews is YaST (Yet Another System Tool). It truly is an amazing utility, with which you can graphically perform tasks that on any other distribution you would be doing by hand. Graphically changing hostnames, installing packages, changing kernel parameters, changing GRUB around, setting up a LDAP / Mail server, etc. It can all be done through YaST.
The Not-so-good
So far it is sounding like a very good distro, no? Well, there is one minor issue that you will run into. To enable networking, you have to select a check mark in the NetworkManager applet for whatever DE you're using. After it's selected you must reboot to start using networking. It's a minor annoyance for some, but it grows into bigger problems for others.
I have a hardware condition that disallows proper shutdown. Thanks to this networking problem I have absolutely no internet access whatsoever. This is an incredibly rare case, but it's bound to effect others out there. And even if it never effects your computer to this extent, it WILL happen to you.
On first run, packagekit will persistently run, causing you to either have to kill it or reboot. This has something to do with it checking for updates and crashing.
Would I use this distribution?
I really wanted to. I downloaded the .iso to move from Sabayon 11 to something a bit more Enterprise, but ran into some bugs that stopped me in my tracks. It is destined to become Ubuntu fodder.
Who would use this distribution?
Don't get this review wrong. Opensuse is one of the best Operating Systems for enterprise workstations and home desktops. It is an Operating System crafted specifically for desktop and laptop use, none of this touch-friendly nonsense that some companies have started introducing. If you are fine with some rough corners, use it. It is the best default KDE experience I have ever seen, even if it is an earlier version. I just think that they should have polished the distribution a tad bit more before releasing it.
Showing posts with label opensuse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opensuse. Show all posts
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Opensuse 12.2 Review
Opensuse is an enterprise operating system produced by Novell. It is free (in both senses), fast, and standards-compliant with most of the Standard Linux Base's demands (including .rpm as the package format). I have found that Opensuse is widely applicable and should be better praised, because it works in such a different way than any distro I have used to date. Here is the review.
A whole new world of efficiency
12.2 is fast. And that isn't just a buzzword, it really is fast. Everything from boot to actually using the operating system is just faster than it would be on Ubuntu with a similar setup. One of the reasons for this is the leaving out of certain modules and programs (indexing) that take a big toll on the speed of the system. Also, since it is mostly used for servers Novell cannot afford to have a performance issue, so they trimmed the fat.
Another thing I noticed was incredibly low memory usage. On KDE with Firefox it uses around 500 MiB of RAM. That is extremely small considering that KDE is a beast that is notable for using >1GiB when it feels like it. I'm sure that in an environment like the awesome window manager that number would fall even further.
Repositories and Packages
This is the only area where I was disappointed. In the past small repositories have been a dealbreaker for me, and Opensuse came close. Its repositories aren't nearly as extensive as Ubuntu's or Debian's, or even Sabayon's. For instance, for an edX course a program named Scratch was needed. It was not in the repositories and it was not available as an Opensuse-compatible .rpm, so I have to compile it from the source. That is a large inconvenience. And it has happened before, too. The Awesome window manager isn't even in the repositories, and there is no .rpm package with satisfiable dependencies. That's why I am stuck with KDE for the time being.
The package manager is nice, though. As is the command line version. .rpm grouping (shown above) and pattern searching (command line) are helpful tools to install packages. In fact, pattern searching reduces the needs of pesky meta packages that have been known to cause breakages in systems past.
Opensuse even comes with a program called apper that can install .rpm files, which is much alike what Fedora and Ubuntu do with their respective formats (with software installer and gdebi or the software center)
YaST
If you are researching Opensuse, you have probably heard about YaST. Yast is the configuration tool that comes with Opensuse, and it has features far outside the range of normal configuration tools. Some interesting features are the ability to replace your bootloader from a combo box, install and browse software, configure kernel options, and even set up a mail server. If you can think of something you need to do, it can be done via YaST.
Conclusion
Opensuse is enterprise. That's all there is to it. If you want a reliable, fast, easily configurable system it is the operating system for you. On the other hand, for a purely desktop-oriented experience it may be a bit too official of a stab at Linux.
A whole new world of efficiency
12.2 is fast. And that isn't just a buzzword, it really is fast. Everything from boot to actually using the operating system is just faster than it would be on Ubuntu with a similar setup. One of the reasons for this is the leaving out of certain modules and programs (indexing) that take a big toll on the speed of the system. Also, since it is mostly used for servers Novell cannot afford to have a performance issue, so they trimmed the fat.
Another thing I noticed was incredibly low memory usage. On KDE with Firefox it uses around 500 MiB of RAM. That is extremely small considering that KDE is a beast that is notable for using >1GiB when it feels like it. I'm sure that in an environment like the awesome window manager that number would fall even further.
Repositories and PackagesThis is the only area where I was disappointed. In the past small repositories have been a dealbreaker for me, and Opensuse came close. Its repositories aren't nearly as extensive as Ubuntu's or Debian's, or even Sabayon's. For instance, for an edX course a program named Scratch was needed. It was not in the repositories and it was not available as an Opensuse-compatible .rpm, so I have to compile it from the source. That is a large inconvenience. And it has happened before, too. The Awesome window manager isn't even in the repositories, and there is no .rpm package with satisfiable dependencies. That's why I am stuck with KDE for the time being.
The package manager is nice, though. As is the command line version. .rpm grouping (shown above) and pattern searching (command line) are helpful tools to install packages. In fact, pattern searching reduces the needs of pesky meta packages that have been known to cause breakages in systems past.
Opensuse even comes with a program called apper that can install .rpm files, which is much alike what Fedora and Ubuntu do with their respective formats (with software installer and gdebi or the software center)
YaST
Conclusion
Opensuse is enterprise. That's all there is to it. If you want a reliable, fast, easily configurable system it is the operating system for you. On the other hand, for a purely desktop-oriented experience it may be a bit too official of a stab at Linux.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Comparison of three Linux Operating Systems
A while back I wrote Comparison of Operating Systems, but it turned into more of a tutorial than anything. It only compared Windows and Ubuntu Linux, my current OS. So now I am going to compare Fedora 15, Opensuse 11.4, and Ubuntu 11.4. Let's start with Fedora.
Fedora is a free Linux OS sponsored by Red Hat, the creators of Red Hat enterprise Linux. The fifteenth release (the most recent at the time of writing) includes the Gnome 3 desktop environment in it's fullest form. It has some Gnome features that you can't get from the unstable repository currently available on Ubuntu. It starts off with just a close button, but that can be easily fixed using the Gnome tweak tool. As an Operating System it didn't seem to vary much than how Ubuntu acted when I had Gnome 3 on it. It did have one serious graphical issue. I was doing some 3D graphics at the time using Google Sketchup 8 through Wine and it wouldn't boot in fedora. I did some Googling and sifting through the forums and found that Fedora had some unofficial Nvidia drivers instead of the ones found through Administration>Additional Drivers in Ubuntu. After manually installing these drivers all hell broke loose on the Operating System. It simply wouldn't boot after installing the drivers. This is a known problem and it wasn't something that I had messed up installing them. If you do 3D art or anything else that requires good graphics (Heavy desktop effects, gaming, and 3D just to name a few) then Fedora isn't for any Nvidia user. Otherwise it was a very nice and friendly operating system.
The next Operating System is Arch linux. Looks pretty similar to an OS X and Windows mixtogether, right? Incredibly wrong. When, (and if you are able to) install Arch Linux you have no GUI whatsoever. You need to manually download and configure an X11 Window manager and a desktop environment to get a GUI. However, this makes Arch an extremely lightweight OS when you first download it. Arch is a platform on which you can build upon whatever software you wish. Arch Linux comes with a package manager called Pacman, which many people find to be a step up from apt and it is. Pacman can even give suggestions to what packages you may be looking for if you make a spelling mistake in your query.
Arch can be seen as a canvas where the artist can paint whatever they wish.
The last Operating System in our comparison today is Ubuntu 11.04. Ubuntu started off as a fork from Debian, the Universal Operating System. At first all it aimed to do was improve on Debian's slow update times, but it turned into something else. Now Ubuntu is the distribution of choice for newcomers to the Linux kernel. It is where users aspiring to move beyond it come to learn, and it is where people who want a highly customizable OS come to stay. Because of Debian's popularity, and now Ubuntu's, anything available to Linux is usually available to Ubuntu in the form of a .deb file, which requires 0 source building. I could start complaining about Unity again, but I have already done that and it isn't what this post is about. The installation is made easy with the Live CD, so there is virutally no command line to have to worry about during installation.
The decision...
Even though Ubuntu, Fedora, and Opensuse are great Operating Systems I have to make Arch the winner of this comparison. Arch just gives you the very basics and lets you decide what part of an Operating System you need. Do I use arch? No. Do I think it is a great idea of a Linux enthusiast to use Arch? Yes.
Fedora is a free Linux OS sponsored by Red Hat, the creators of Red Hat enterprise Linux. The fifteenth release (the most recent at the time of writing) includes the Gnome 3 desktop environment in it's fullest form. It has some Gnome features that you can't get from the unstable repository currently available on Ubuntu. It starts off with just a close button, but that can be easily fixed using the Gnome tweak tool. As an Operating System it didn't seem to vary much than how Ubuntu acted when I had Gnome 3 on it. It did have one serious graphical issue. I was doing some 3D graphics at the time using Google Sketchup 8 through Wine and it wouldn't boot in fedora. I did some Googling and sifting through the forums and found that Fedora had some unofficial Nvidia drivers instead of the ones found through Administration>Additional Drivers in Ubuntu. After manually installing these drivers all hell broke loose on the Operating System. It simply wouldn't boot after installing the drivers. This is a known problem and it wasn't something that I had messed up installing them. If you do 3D art or anything else that requires good graphics (Heavy desktop effects, gaming, and 3D just to name a few) then Fedora isn't for any Nvidia user. Otherwise it was a very nice and friendly operating system.
Arch can be seen as a canvas where the artist can paint whatever they wish.
The decision...
Even though Ubuntu, Fedora, and Opensuse are great Operating Systems I have to make Arch the winner of this comparison. Arch just gives you the very basics and lets you decide what part of an Operating System you need. Do I use arch? No. Do I think it is a great idea of a Linux enthusiast to use Arch? Yes.
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