Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 71.131.185.90]
on August 25, 2008 10:59 PM
I have to agree this wasn't much in the way of a well organized tour. And very little of KDE 4 was being demonstrated. Pretty much this same demo could have been done with the OpenSUSE 10.3 I have running on my machine currently using the older KDE 3.x series..
One thing that could have been mentioned as part of the "experience" - because it's THE worst part of the openSUSE experience - is the time it takes to install software due to the automatic refreshing of repositories EVERY TIME you open the "Install Software" application. If you have a lot of repositories like I have, to give yourself the widest range of available software, refreshing those repositories can take five minutes. And if you just did it ten minutes ago and suddenly decide to install something else, guess what? You do it all over again. Anybody using this system to install software more than once should have realized that the repository refresh should have been optional for the user. Can you say "bad design"? I knew you could. There isn't a single Linux distro that gets package management right yet and openSUSE is no exception.
Generally speaking, however, I've found openSUSE to be quite stable (I have rarely crashed the X Window system, although Firefox has managed it a couple times, courtesy of Mozilla's poor QA), generally free from bizarre bugs (unlike Kubuntu in the past) and VERY complete in the software selection you get out of the box. By the way, you can also switch off that lousy dumbed down menu system they have which Rob was demonstrating and return to the old classic KDE menu system which is much easier to work with. All in all, I rank openSUSE considerably higher than the (x)buntus as one of the top distros available.
And before all the wailing about Novell's deal with Microsoft starts - I said that was a non-issue when it happened and that's exactly what it has proven to be. Nyah, nyah!
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A video tour of openSUSE 11 (with KDE 4 desktop)
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 71.131.185.90] on August 25, 2008 10:59 PMOne thing that could have been mentioned as part of the "experience" - because it's THE worst part of the openSUSE experience - is the time it takes to install software due to the automatic refreshing of repositories EVERY TIME you open the "Install Software" application. If you have a lot of repositories like I have, to give yourself the widest range of available software, refreshing those repositories can take five minutes. And if you just did it ten minutes ago and suddenly decide to install something else, guess what? You do it all over again. Anybody using this system to install software more than once should have realized that the repository refresh should have been optional for the user. Can you say "bad design"? I knew you could. There isn't a single Linux distro that gets package management right yet and openSUSE is no exception.
Generally speaking, however, I've found openSUSE to be quite stable (I have rarely crashed the X Window system, although Firefox has managed it a couple times, courtesy of Mozilla's poor QA), generally free from bizarre bugs (unlike Kubuntu in the past) and VERY complete in the software selection you get out of the box. By the way, you can also switch off that lousy dumbed down menu system they have which Rob was demonstrating and return to the old classic KDE menu system which is much easier to work with. All in all, I rank openSUSE considerably higher than the (x)buntus as one of the top distros available.
And before all the wailing about Novell's deal with Microsoft starts - I said that was a non-issue when it happened and that's exactly what it has proven to be. Nyah, nyah!
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