Submitted by “The openSUSE team officially released version 10.3 on October 4th. openSUSE is a popular German Linux distribution that Distrowatch.com lists as one of the ‘top ten’. Underneath its new green artwork, version 10.3’s improvements over previous versions include cutting down the time it takes to reach the graphical login screen; speeding up and streamlining its package management utility; and making it easier for users to install software using a new ‘one-click install’ process.”
you think that they cannot come up with things you actually miss but again, very good!
also the addition of the build site is great.
Edited 2007-10-14 15:55
Downloaded eagerly and then:
– Took a long time to install in Parallels, still to many installation steps. Check out Linspire to see how it’s supposed to be done
– Selected to install the parallels tools / drivers
– Wouldn’t work unless I was root. Had to sudo it, good thing I know as a Mac user how to do this, if I was a Windows user, I would have given up here
= Machine restarted, and then wouldn’t boot
*sigh*, maybe next year.
I don’t doubt how wonderful the software is, it would just be nice if I could install it easier, and installing drivers wasn’t such a joke that threatened to total the whole installation beyond my knowledge to repair it.
Something similar happened to me in VM Ware Fusion. I tried to just install a server version (w/out KDE or Gnome) and after doing the dependency dance, the entire installer quit.
I’m really interested in learning more about the new package management that’s supposed to be included in 10.3 but nobody ever seems to discuss it. A distro is more than a sum of it’s apps and desktop wallpaper folks.
No problems here with installation. It installed without a glitch. IMHO SuSE installer is far more convenient and comprehensible than Ubuntu or Mandriva. On SuSE I can control what is going to be installed on my hardware. For me installation took about 35 minutes (1 cd KDE without repos enabled).
Most of your problems seem to be Parallel’s fault, not SuSE.
A quick google for “parallels tools opensuse” reveals:
1) how to install under suse
2) that installing the tools breaks KDE/Gnome under 10.3 (and Kubuntu 7.10, apparently).
I keep seeing people wanting “stupider” installers for Linux– Personally, I like the fact that SuSE gives you a fairly streamlined installer, with the option to control all aspects if you want.
Something is “stupid” because it works?
Same here. I’ve installed using the dvd version so i could try both kde and gnome and well, not overly impressed. Still crashy on my main box, 10.2 seemed better to me.
Maybe i should have tried the cd versions.
[QUOTE]Selected to install the parallels tools / drivers
– Wouldn’t work unless I was root. Had to sudo it, good thing I know as a Mac user how to do this, if I was a Windows user, I would have given up here
= Machine restarted, and then wouldn’t boot [/QUOTE]
um, if you were a windows user, you wouldn’t be running it in Parallels and therefore this “fault” would never have surfaced.
I had absolutely no trouble installing it. Haven’t had any issues with the installation with any version of opensuse. Same goes for most other mainstream linux distros i’ve tried.
I figure until a linux distro wakes people up in the morning, and makes their breakfast and coffee, people will still complain that its too hard to use.
Parallels is available on Windows, so is many good VM softwares.
Not sure how this is SuSe’s fault, Kroc. It installed very quickly in VMWare 6.0 running on 10.2, and ran great.
Then I did a complete reinstall natively (had to do some repartitioning with XP anyway) and it went very well, and it most definitely blows away 10.2. Faster, more stable, and the 64-bit edition is fantastic.
Sorry you had a bad experience, but I don’t think this was SuSe’s fault, but rather Parallels.
In my opinion, this is history.
Install the English KDE- or Gnome-iso and you’ll see what I mean.
Moreover, The Suse days of KDE domination are also gone. Novell prefers Gnome, you can “feel” it when you use 10.3.
But this doesn’t really matter:
I have just installed version KDE-10.3 on my AMD K6-3 400MHz with 256MB RAM and it works fine, with reasonable speed.
By the way, I would have used the Suse-10.3-XFce-iso for the installation, but there is none. So I am just downloading it now from the Suse OSS repository.
But according to the last openSUSE survey, 71.8% of openSUSE users use mainly KDE and 22.4% Gnome.
http://files.opensuse.org/opensuse/en/6/6c/Opensuse_survey_102_data…
When you install both desktops, you see at once that Novell invested far more energy and time into the “Novell Gnome experience”.
KDE is a very polished desktop, no doubt about it.
But Novell’s Gnome is far more than this. In my opinion, they tried to make everything easier for the Linux newbie.
(For e.g. an experienced Debian Gnome user, Novell’s Gnome might be a horror, because at first sight he might not recognize it as “Gnome”. But this is another “problem”.)
One example:
With Gnome compiz works out of the box with one simple click on “Desktop Effects” in the altered Gnome Control Center (I tested this on another box with a ATI Radeon 7500; Novell uses Xgl instead of Aiglx, so that (at first hand) your OpenGL games don’t work anymore).
And KDE? Nothing is mentioned here, no simple “Bring me to “Desktop Effects Wonderland” button can be found.
When you install both desktops, you see at once that Novell invested far more energy and time into the “Novell Gnome experience”.
Most of the Novell Gnome experience is pulled from SLED, and the only evidence I can see of it really is GTK YaST which was a Google Summer of Code project, and the appalling SLAB menu. Honestly, Ubuntu has a far better Gnome environment than Novell does.
But Novell’s Gnome is far more than this. In my opinion, they tried to make everything easier for the Linux newbie.
Can you define this Linux newbie you’ve heard about, or is this just something you’ve heard from other people?
With Gnome compiz works out of the box with one simple click on “Desktop Effects” in the altered Gnome Control Center…
It worked for me on KDE as well, but really, my mileage has varied considerably with both KDE and Gnome where Compiz is concerned. The correct place for this stuff is in the default window manager, and that’s where it’s going in KDE 4.
Novell uses Xgl instead of Aiglx, so that (at first hand) your OpenGL games don’t work anymore
I just find the proliferation of usage of stuff like XGL to be a bit daft to be honest. That’s why I don’ yet use any of the 3D effects. Too much existing stuff just doesn’t work.
And KDE? Nothing is mentioned here, no simple “Bring me to “Desktop Effects Wonderland” button can be found.
I don’t really think that being able to enable fancy 3D desktop effects, that incidentally breaks a lot of stuff, to be evidence that the ‘Novell Gnome Experience’ is actually going anywhere.
Regardless, in OpenSuse more people still use KDE than Gnome by quite some margin. I doubt that telling everyone that Gnome is now the supposed default is going to change that.
My installation of OpenSuse’s KDE, Gnome and XFce is now a few hours old.
I see a lot of changes in Novell’s Gnome and almost none in KDE. This might be a result of the fact that Suse still uses the KDE 3.5.x series, but for me it is obvious that there is a clear intention behind these “heavy” changes to the original Gnome desktop.
( http://news.opensuse.org/?p=264#more-264 )
Moreover, I couldn’t find the tool kappfinder in order to complete my K menu (absolutely horrible for me).
In Gnome there is no problem if I want to install new software, I use gtk-Yast and I find everything (or it seems that I find everything).
In qt-Yast a few applications are missing although they are shown when the gtk-Yast frontend is used.
But I’ll reinstall the Yast packages and see whether this behaviour will appear again.
Personally I have no good feelings about this new Gnome “features” at the moment. The new slab menu gives me almost no information. Moreover, I couldn’t get rid of it with one mouse click, I had to search for the “classic” Gnome menu. But in this classic menu the “Gnome ControlCenter” was missing so I had to add this manually (side by side with the gtk-Yast Control Center).
You are right about these 3D desktop effects.
Moreover, I don’t understand why Suse 10.3 uses Xgl instead of Aiglx with my ATI Radeon 7500 card which has native OpenGL support, provided that the “Desktop Effects Enable” button is used in Gnome.
Debian Etch on another partition of the same computer uses Aiglx together with compiz. Here e.g. torcs is still playable without any workaround.
“Desktop verions of SuSE Linux were traditionally sold in boxed sets that included excellent written documentation. (I have a SuSE Linux 7.3 boxed set on the shelf that includes no less than four manuals and one “quick install guide.”)”
I don’t call it good documentation if there’s so much stuff that no one will ever dare to read it.
In these days Suse named this Suse 7.3 box “Suse 7.3 Professional” (1DVD, 7CDs, 4 (5) manuals, more than 1100 pages).
And the Suse people meant exactly what they said.
Tried the One CD KDEi386 install.Went well,even though the adding the respository and downloading the packages took ages.
Then, I rebooted to be told, cannot detect the video card properly.Had to log in from the command line and the desktop looked a mess.Taskbar and some icons missing.
10.3 has promise but a glitch like this is inexcusable.I am hoping I just had a bad download and will try again later.
This review doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already about OpenSuSE (previous versions, too, not just this one).
One thing that isn’t spelled out enough, though, is the extent to which OpenSuSE is just a testbed for the SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Hence the interesting statistic above, namely that although a clear majority of OpenSuSE users may prefer KDE the distro itself concentrates more on Gnome, because that’s what SLES does. If the survey is accurate – it’s only a small, self-selecting sample, after all – one wonders whether OpenSuSE is really on the right track. I mean, why use a distro that may well not listen to its own users?
I’m not sure the people who complain about the KDE support in SuSE actually use the distro. I’m not seeing the support for KDE declining in SuSE, and I’m a KDE-on-SuSE user since the early 7.x releases.
If you’re going to make statements like “the distro itself concentrates more on Gnome”, please back it up with something besides speculation. In what way is KDE not as well supported as Gnome?
And please don’t mention the GTK-based app installer– It’s hideous, and barely usable in my opinion. The “real” YaST software tool is in a completely different league for functionality.
No, they don’t. They also don’t read the KDE developer blogs, they don’t utilize the build-service with current packages for KDE 3/4 and community packages, and they haven’t used the KDE 4 LiveCD, among other things. If they did there would be no question that openSUSE is one of the premier sponsors of KDE, or that Novell provides more paid KDE developers than any other distribution or organization.
Complaining that openSUSE favors Gnome over KDE is sort of like complaining that Ubuntu favors KDE over Gnome.
No, they don’t. They also don’t read the KDE developer blogs, they don’t utilize the build-service with current packages for KDE 3/4 and community packages, and they haven’t used the KDE 4 LiveCD, among other things. If they did there would be no question that openSUSE is one of the premier sponsors of KDE, or that Novell provides more paid KDE developers than any other distribution or organization.
That’s BS. I’ve used every version of SuSE since 7.3 and you’d have to be blind not to have noticed that OpenSuSE is slowly but surely pumping up Gnome and, overall, giving it a little more lurv than KDE. There’s a reason for that too, apart from copy-catting Fedora: SLES, which is the real driver of the whole show. As for blogs, try PlanetSuSE – you’d be lucky to take away the impression that KDE even exists. Of course it’s good that Novell contribute financially to KDE, as they do to many open source projects. Given Novell’s increasingly constrained finances, though, not to mention their decreasing headcount and stagnant market share at the commercial end, it might be wise not to rely on them as, er, cast-iron sponsors that far out into the future.
I downloaded openSUSE 10.3 on Friday, and I’ve done a number of installs, and played around with it, installed software, tried different configurations.
I did the Gnome version.
Here are my thoughts …
The good:
1. It’s gorgeous. It is the best looking desktop distro I’ve seen so far. The green theme/backgrounds/splash screens, the icons, the fonts, the layout of things, are all really really nice.
2. Fast boot, and fast loading of Gnome.
3. Responsiveness is quick, after a few tweeks (see the “needs improvement” section below).
4. YaST is comprehensive, powerful, full-featured.
5. One-Click install – in a word … awesome.
6. System overall “feels” solid. This is very subjective and kind of general, but it’s a feeling I don’t quite get with some distros (even though those other ones are good in other areas).
7. The YaST installer is very good. It’s easy to use, and gives full control over how the system is installed, and it has a nice, logical flow to it.
Needs Improvement:
1. Beagle, as in don’t include it. Simply put, Beagle is a huge resource hog, and causes lot’s of extra disc i/o. And desktop search, while cool in theory, is quite frankly a solution in search of a problem. I mean, I don’t really have any trouble finding my files without the aid of a desktop search tool, and I highly doubt most people have that problem either. It’s not worth all the extra overhead to have these super fast desktop searches.
And uninstalling Beagle is one of the first things I do (one of the tweaks I mentioned above). After that, everything speeds up.
Apart from that Beagle does what it’s designed to do quite well. It’s just that what it’s designed to do, an indexing desktop search engine, seems superfluous to me. Same goes for Vista search, or Google desktop search, or any other indexing desktop search engine.
2. AppArmour. AppArmour is SUSE’s answer to SELinux in RH/Fedora. This would be quite useful in a total mission critical enterprise environment. But it’s kinda overkill for must home desktop usage. And, like Beagle, AppArmour adds lots of overhead, and slows down the loading and execution of a lot of apps, and the Slab menu. Disabling AppArmour, helps speed things up for me.
3. Slab menu. It looks nice. It’s easy. But it’s slow, slow, slow. Clicking on the “More Applications” button is basically launching a browser, which involves the start up time of a regular decent sized application. And when it’s loaded up, actually selecting the app you want to use is more clicks than a regular menu would involve. Also, Slab uses a fair bit of memory.
What’s wrong with regular style menus, especially Gnome’s standard menu bar (which I think is excellent – fast easy access to apps, with minimal clicks)?
Nothing, really, and Slab is not an improvement, unless you like slowness, more clicks, and more memory consumption.
This is the third tweak I mentioned above. I right click on “Computer” (the slab menu) on the Gnome panel and select “Remove”, then I right click in the now empty area, and “Add”, then I select the standard Gnome menu bar. Huge improvement in speed and convenience.
4. During installation the “Add online repositories” checkbox is checked by default. This is only bad because it causes the installation to download a Gig or so of software, causing the installation to take about 4 times as long. This happened to me the first time I installed, and the total process took around 2-1/2 hrs. The next time I installed, I unchecked it and the installation to 40 minutes. Much better.
5. The SUSE updater applet. It’s not very configurable, you can’t get rid of it (well, you can select “Quit”, but it will come back on next login/reboot), and it’s sloooooow. It runs no matter what when you login, and it takes an unusually long time for it to query all the enabled repos for updates/patches. And while it’s doing this, everything else is slower, so you might as well wait until it’s done (otherwise be aggravated).
It’s this last thing that has caused me to not keep openSUSE (for now). The other things I could tweak/work-around to my satisfaction. But this last thing I could not change, from what I looked around for on the Web and the openSUSE forums.
That said, if any openSUSE experts or enthusiasts can give me an easy fix, where I can disable the updater-applet and it’s backend, and use one of the other updating services in YaST (which grant greater control over when and how often updates are done), I’d be glad to give it a shot.
In spite of my above gripes, I think openSUSE is really really good – It looks awesome, it’s fast (with tweaks), One-Click install is nothing short of spectacular, and it’s solid all around. Now, if Novell and the openSUSE community can improve upon my above gripes, it would be awesome.
Edited 2007-10-15 22:13
It is very easy to get rid of this updater-applet:
Go into Yast, choose “Software Installation”, search for “opensuse-updater-kde” and “opensuse-updater-gnome” and delete both.
That’s all.
By the way, your posting was much better than most of these so-called “reviews”. Very, very good and many thanks for your improvement hints.
Thanks for the tip. I’m going to try it right away (after finishing this post, then rebooting into the openSUSE installer, installing, and doing the other stuff). My next post will probably be from a fresh openSUSE install (I’m writing this one from a sidux install), reporting success/satisfaction.
Btw – on the “Enable online repositories” checkbox issue – In my opinion, it would be better to have it not checked by default (what’s on the single disc is probably plenty to start off with for most folks), and if it’s checked, it should pop up a message saying that an extra Gig (or however much it is) of software will be downloaded, and the installation will take substantially longer. In other words, go for a “sane” default, then clearly inform the user what’s going to happen if they check it, so they can make their own informed decision. When I did the first install, I was quite annoyed that it was taking so long, being used to Ubuntu installs that take 10 – 15 minutes.
That was my last nag. Now I can use the other YaST tools to keep my system updated, and have more control, and have it happen when it’s more convenient for me (rather than every time I boot).
Also, the system is faster, and is using less resources.
I’m now doing all my other tweaks, and downloading the software I want (Eclipse, Monodevelop, gnome-games, gcc, codices, etc).
Even if you just added the community repos, when you try to install software via Yast again the *.repomds are being freshed. Doesn’t the bloody thing have a counter?
What could possibly be changed in a few seconds?
Would be a bless if only the OpenSuSE project had as much high available mirrors as ubuntu and debian.
Last but not least 10.3 is what 10/10.1/10.2 should have been so undeniable they are heading on the right track.
Try to install for example dvdrip from community. Result is a big pile of dependancy shit list. What’s the use of those additional repos and Yast if you have to manually get rid of the bumps?
Maybe 10.4 or 10.5 will cut it.