Return to openSUSE

Last week, I replaced the Linux distribution on my laptop’s hard drive; I had been using Fedora 9, and I replaced it with openSUSE version 11. SUSE was the first Linux distro I tried when I first used Linux in late 2002, and by and large I have gone back to it despite experimenting with others. Right now, I have SUSE on my laptop and Ubuntu on my Compaq desktop machine. I am not sure how long I’ll keep on with it – I have read that the new version of Mandriva is good, which is very unusual for them – but here are my impressions, anyway.

First, the installation is the sanest of all the distributions which try to give you a choice of what to do (i.e. compared to the likes of Ubuntu, which installs a basic desktop and leaves any customisation for later). It asks you the usual questions about the layout of your keyboard and your time zone, asks you for a standard desktop (you can choose to install the other one in the next step), then gives you a list of what the installer will do and the opportunity to change anything: the partitioning, the software, what’s on the boot menu. The system has had a facelift using recent versions of Qt 4 with a custom styling, and you can choose from what seems like a wider range of packages compared to Fedora 9. Dependency resolution takes a whole lot less time than it does under Fedora 9, although even this has seen improvements.

I have not yet tried the latest Mandriva, but the tools do feel, if not more polished, then certainly better done than Mandriva’s. If you cancel a job, you don’t get a pointless message box saying simply “Wizcancel.” as you did on recent versions of Mandriva; with Mandriva I had also had the problem of trying to add entries to the boot menu and finding that it just didn’t do what you said, something that I have never witnessed with openSUSE although none of the reviews have mentioned it.

The one problem that has bugged me with both Fedora and openSUSE has been to do with getting my secondary monitor to work. With Windows, you can get it to turn the laptop screen off and just output to the big monitor. The problem is that, unlike a few years ago when both laptop and desktop monitors tended to be 1024×768, nowadays laptop screens tend to have smaller resolutions. My laptop screen has a 1280×800 resolution and my monitor is 1280×1024; some desktop computers now are coming with 1440×900 screens (this all being cinema aspect). There are two major desktop systems available on Linux, namely GNOME and KDE, and GNOME allows you to have the laptop screen showing a subset of what’s on the main screen. This works much better in openSUSE than in Fedora 9; in Fedora 9, if you maximise a window, it will fill up the whole of the laptop’s screen area and not grow any more; in openSUSE 11, it will maximise properly. I could not get anything to work in KDE 4, even with the “resize and rotate” applet. I have always been much more into KDE than GNOME, but with KDE 3 based on software which hit “end of life” nearly a year ago and KDE 4 refusing to handle what must be a fairly common dual head setup properly (perhaps this will change in KDE 4.1), I’ve switched to GNOME recently.

Reading some of the reviews, there is a lot of carping going on. One of the most common is that openSUSE lacks focus or a clear target audience. A simple answer is that its target audience is people who want to use it; it does have an established user base who like the toolset that comes with it. I find its package installer easier to use than any of those available on Fedora, and there’s a command-line interface called zypper, which I’ve not tried. YaST, which is the subject of one of the carping reviews, is a general configuration tool, and again many distros lack any such thing. Perhaps the alternatives are more acceptable to anyone coming from “old Unix” backgrounds, but the ability to add users and install software without needing to go to the command line would no doubt be useful to many people.

One issue I do have is the “SLAB” menu, a kind of Start menu replacement in the GNOME desktop. The main menu launcher says “Computer”, and when you click it before the desktop has fully loaded, nothing happens. To get the full application menu, you have to click the “More Applications” button from within the “slab”, which then takes a couple of seconds to open. Using the panel configurer you can replace it with a “traditional main menu”, which consists of one main menu rather than three, which is nowadays more usual (standard on Fedora and Ubuntu); the three-menu arrangement is just not available. Perhaps there’s a package that can be installed to put this right, because I think the slab menu sucks and the single menu is not satisfactory either.

The build service is another trump card with openSUSE; it is an online service run by Novell which allows software developers to release packages for a variety of Linux distributions. Although you can release software for other Linux systems, including Mandriva and Fedora, the main target is openSUSE and it is the first port of call for add-on software for the OS. A favourite claim of the carpers is that openSUSE is tarnished by Novell’s patent deal with Microsoft, although openSUSE is a fully open-source product that you do not have to pay for, and unless you are actually in patent-related litigation with either company, it is unlikely to impact on any ordinary user.

Another favourite claim is that it is nothing more than a public beta for their Enterprise Desktop products; I suppose any Linux distribution with an enterprise spin-off would face such suspicions. Surely, the question should be how stable the system is, how well its tools work, whether the system updates actually work (there are problems with this, but I filed a bug report because the updater exited when it failed to find one package, and after it was acted on I did not have any more problems). My own conclusion is that this is a generally fine distribution with the most comprehensive graphical tool set available. I may well give the new Mandriva a try, despite saying I’d not bother with them in future because of previous experience, but will be happy to come back to OpenSUSE if that proves unsatisfactory.