OpenSUSE 10.2 - something to catch up with

[Carsten Agger]

I recently got a new laptop at work, and since its default Windows XP
installation seemed to include nothing I couldn't do with a Gnu/Linux
operating system instead, I burned an Ubuntu 6.10 live/install CD and
tried to install.

The Live CD, however, crashed while attempting to start the X server, so
I was left with no opportunity to progress or to see how Edgy would
support the wifi, graphics card, etc.

So I thought "Oh no!", and not wanting to go through a whole lot of
hardware debugging trouble I decided to burn the OpenSUSE 10.2 install CD.

I must say, after a somewhat long download it installed flawlessly,
setup all the hardware, recognized the hardware without any trouble,
recognized the screen resolution (1440x900) and included a nice GNOME
desktop and an excellent selection of applications.

The user interface is less intuitive though, and took some tweaking (in
the direction of Ubuntu/Debian's default GNOME desktop) for me to like
it ...

But apart from that: After doing the "Hacking OpenSUSE 10.2"
(http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/60/) steps to include
DVD and MP3 playback &c., ... obtained as swiftly and painlessly as I
never tried before with an Ubuntu system.

It's not ALL to OpenSUSE's credit, though - Ubuntu got me started on
Linux and I know more about setting up Linux systems than, say, a year
ago, but still ... with this system installed I don't really need to
think of having an operating system installed, I just have a computer
with applications that work, that was installed easily with everything
working out of the box.

And Ubuntu never did exactly that for me yet.

I later tried the Ubuntu Dapper LTS live CD and found out it actually
doesn't crash when loading ... so installing Dapper and updating Firefox
etc. from backports might have worked. From which we can learn two things:

1) Crashing install CDs are BAD - they really turn of even quite
enthusiastic users
2) Technically, OpenSUSE 10.2 is giving Ubuntu a run for its money. I'm
also running Xubuntu and Edubuntu Edgy on an older machine, and I won't
hesitate to say that technically, OpenSUSE 10.2 is  superior to Edgy.

There are bad things too, though: I don't really like YaST, for
instance, and the menus aren't organized as well as in the default GNOME
setup - but, the overall impression is that of a really, really good distro.

I'm not saying this to thrash Ubuntu or to "defect" - the
Microsoft/Novell deal has made me a bit suspicious as to the intentions
of Novell, and the Ubuntu community support is second to none - BUT,
OpenSUSE is a worthy competitor, a worthy target for Ubuntu 7.x to match
(and hopefully surpass!)

regards
Carsten

--
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