Review of OpenSUSE 10.3
I switched to Ubuntu a few years ago, but now I'm sick of it. It's mainly because of the bugs - after updating to 7.10 I get error messages on login and CD burning no longer works.
Instead of reinstalling Ubuntu, I decided to try a different distro. I've used Fedora Core before but I switched to Ubuntu because it was never as up-to-date with packages, because the updater (yum) was slow and stupid, and because it liked to corrupt my SATA hard drive periodically. I've also tried Debian and Slackware before, but I found them to be a lot of work to setup and maintain, so I went for OpenSUSE 10.3
I chose the network install so I could leave it going while I was out.
The Install
...was almost completely painless. In particular, my JFS /home partition was supported without having to install anything extra. The only mishap was when it appeared to freeze early on - it was in fact downloading package information, but didn't bother to display a status bar.
All the important hardware was detected.
Screenshots
So I've installed OpenSuSE and logged in. I think that it would be nice to have a screenshot of my desktop. I press the PrintScrn key and I see...
Alt-Tab also does nothing! Not even an error message.
Freeview
I have a USB freeview (digital TV) adaptor which works with Linux and Windows. I got it working on OpenSUSE after installing some codecs and a firmware file. But the playback was terrible. If the computer is being used for anything else at the same time - e.g. browsing the web - the video stutters so much it's unwatchable. This happens even if you give the TV program (Kaffeine) high priority.
Frequency Scaling
I was disappointed to find that frequency scaling did not work with my AMD Athlon 64 3000.
I find it reduces the fan noise drastically (the fans are temperature sensitive) - I've had for years in Ubuntu.
Appearance
The boot, shutdown and login screens are all very polished, as is the main Gnome theme.
The Gnome menus have been altered. They looks quite smart, but getting to programs now takes twice as long.
Package Manager (YaST)
I've used the same partitioning as in Ubuntu - separate /boot, / and /home partitions. OpenSUSE warns me that I'm low on disk space every time I install a new package, even though no partition is more than half full. Not very intelligent.
YaST grabs focus for every package it installs. As a result, it's near impossible to get work done while you are installing new software - every few seconds you have to click back to what you were working on. The annoying-ness of this 'feature' cannot be understated.
Graphics Drivers
This was the lowest point of my OpenSUSE experience.
3D acceleration was not enabled by default for my card (a nVidia GeForce 6200) so I followed a tutorial on the OpenSUSE website. It had me run a 'one-click' installer which added files from an nVIDIA package repository. All seemed fine, until I rebooted. X failed to start ("no screens found"). I went to modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but it's auto-generated and has a "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE" warning at the top.
I found the utility program that generates xorg.conf and ran it several times to no avail - each time it found a working configuration, but upon rebooting nothing had changed.
I didn't manage to get X11 working again, hence the lack of screenshots!
Summary
OpenSUSE was let down by simply having too many bugs.
It seems designed for less technical users (with its GUIs for package management, modified menus, loading screens to hide output at startup etc.) but it fails miserably when things go wrong.
I'm going to try PCLinuxOS next - according to Distrowatch it's the most popular Linux distribution now.
Copyright (C) 2006-8 Ryan Lothian. All rights reserved.