OpenSuse 10.3: How does it compare to LinuxMint?

[Kinne]

So, we have the GoldMaster final release of OpenSuse 10.3

Here is a direct link for (high speed) downloading it:

http://ftp.uni-ulm.de/pub/mirrors/opens ... /10.3/iso/

A nice comparison between Suse and LinuxMint would be great...


EDIT by scorp123 (forum moderator): Subject changed. I was about to delete this thread because I thought it's spam! Please make sure you write meaningful and clear subject titles, OK?

[Kinne]

Ok
I just thought everybody is eager to download that new release

[scorp123]

I just thought everybody is eager to download that new release

Riiiiiight, that's why everybody around here is hanging out in a forum dedicated to a *different* Linux distribution??

Your logic is flawed

[scorp123]

Damn you!! You made me curious .... Now I am downloading it

[kanishka]

Ahahaha so his logic wasn't flawed at all

[scorp123]

Ahahaha so his logic wasn't flawed at all

aaaaargh ..... Shut up

[frank392]

suse 10.3 looks Great!! works way much better than before huge difference

[linuxviolin]

suse 10.3 looks Great!!

hmm bof... And with the deal with Microsoft... no Suse for me, no Microsoft openLinux sorry

[scorp123]

:shock: suse 10.3 looks Great!! works way much better than before huge difference

But the installation is still a big hassle .... And either you install from the DVD and SUSE --as always-- tries to install way too much + all the packages I don't want anyway (so I lose a lot of time fine-tuning what I want installed and what I don't want ... as always!) .... OR: you install from the new "KDE-only" or "GNOME-only" CD's which means that the system you get will be missing half of the packages you want, so you'd need to install all of those things afterwards. What a pain in the posterior ... And of course they still don't have a decent package manager that would come pre-configured to handle remote repos properly ...

Sorry, but 'apt-get' is soooo much superior. And thinking of how much hassle the SUSE install still is I have to say I prefer Ubuntu's way: Just give me a basic system ASAP and I and my good friend "Synaptic" will take care of the rest afterwards ...

[scorp123]

And with the deal with Microsoft... no Suse for me, no Microsoft openLinux sorry

Well, he's right that it *looks* good ... But read above. The installation requires you to click through many menus and dialogues ... click click click click ... From that POV you really get that 'good old' XP feeling

[invenit]

Success with an early version of SuSE is the big reason I mostly work with Linux now.

Sooooo...since v10.3 is Novell's greatest release in ten months, I downloaded and installed SuSE yesterday (my machine is just an ordinary Dell Dimension 3000 running at 3 GHz with 1 GB RAM).

By the way, my machine is also highly optimized for mint (Gnome) and takes 50 seconds to fully boot. On SuSE with Gnome, 56 seconds; with KDE, 45 seconds.

Most of my installed time with SuSE was spent with the KDE desktop (since neither mint with KDE nor Kubuntu work well on my machine). To summarize my experience: both KDE & Gnome on SuSE *really* work fine with my gear. Rock solid.

OTOH, I reinstalled mint this morning. Even though SuSE's devs have fixed the package manager (my biggest headache with SuSE), I prefer apt. If I need to run KDE, then I'll look at SuSE or Freespire. Right now, mint (with Gnome) suits me fine.

[thebrix]

So, we have the GoldMaster final release of OpenSuse 10.3

Here is a direct link for (high speed) downloading it:

http://ftp.uni-ulm.de/pub/mirrors/opens ... /10.3/iso/

A nice comparison between Suse and LinuxMint would be great...

I've tried the Gnome edition (1 CD rather than the monster DVD), and Mint will be being put back on tomorrow.

There are two major problems with openSuSE:

1. You get absolutely everything. There is no attempt to tailor the installation to any "audience", so the Gnome control panel is cluttered with obscure options such as "Avahi SSH Server Browser" and "GStreamer Properties" and Yast2 (the equivalent of MintConfig) is even worse - there are so many icons the list is three times the physical height of the screen!)

2. The package manager falls far short. It has been rewritten for 10.3, but a course in user interface design would have been useful before doing the rewrite; it has a two-pane view with Install> and <Remove buttons between the panes which, unless I am missing a trick, is horribly awkward to navigate as I find myself forever scrolling through lists. It has the particularly odd feature that, if a package is installed, it is shown in both lists - "Available" means "installed plus may be installed", rather than "may be installed" which I would have expected.

The package manager is also brittle regarding timeouts (a problem just now when the servers are probably red-hot) and pops up warning boxes unexpectedly ...

Synaptic's three-pane view is so much easier to use, and it feels more polished and robust anyway.

That said, the package manager has a nice feature in that bundles of packages can be specified as XML files then double-clicked to install. This is a sort of controlled version of automatix2 and goes halfway to doing what Mint does, but you are still only getting the packages in the core distribution without refinements.

The killer, for me, is that Firefox plus embedded Java applets (the JRE having to be downloaded and installed separately) bombs out every time an appropriate Web page starts up. I need that combination of components for my work intranet.

Another feature that crashes is the desktop search (what a surprise!) in the usual sneaky way - the daemon fails silently and I am left wondering why there are no search results being returned.

Mind you, the whole thing looks very nice ...

[msgnomer]

I installed it in VirtualBox. It took aaaaaaaages (like 2 hours) to install. That's my fault though - I let it do it's default thing.

It looks really pretty. But beagle was eating up a ton of CPU. Egads.

[dracorX]

One thing Suse used to make right: Yast.

I don't like suse anymore (philosophical differences, too many packages) but using kde edition of mint, I do see that I really miss yast.

Why is it? how is it superior to other tools? (just looking at kde versions of suse I USED to use)

-It is hooked into kcontrol which makes sense, as kcontrol now becomes the "control panel" for KDE AND SYSTEM

-It is very consistent in itself.

Using Mint KDE, i am left with nearly no config tools. Too bad, really...

If someone could please port yast to mintkde or -also possible- do system config tools directly hooking into kcontrol, that would rock.

[Caraibes]

I installed openSUSE 10.3 Gnome CD edition yesterday. The install lasted for ages... Once in the system, it is nice... I am not a big fan of Yast however...

But the biggest problem is that Skype simply won't install !!!

-Could any of you manage to install Skype ?

[Caraibes]

As of Skype, it took a bit of homework...But it works now, in openSUSE 10.3, Gnome edition.

First, I had to read better the Skype website :

Software requirements

* Qt 4.2.1+
* D-Bus 1.0.0
* libsigc++ 2.0.2
* libasound2 1.0.12

I couldn't get everything, so I went to terminal, and typed :
rpm -ivh skype-1.4.0.118-suse.i586.rpm

It said I needed this lib :
libqt4-x11 (Qt 4 libraries which are used for drawing widgets and OpenGL items.)

Once installed, everything worked !

I am glad it worked out, but I wish it would have been simpler...

[elder]

not impressed at all by suse 10.3.

Cons:

- took ~2 hrs to install (why downloading all the install packages and not used the CD??)

- WORST: my NVIDIA LE 1650 LE reported as not supporting 3d accel, which is false

- ugly fonts on my 19 inch LCD
- had to tweak xorg.conf in order to eleiminate monitor's "Video Mode not supported" message
- slow software install program compared to synaptic

[frank392]

take a look

the title of the page is:Some openSUSE 10.3 Misconceptions.
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3019

[GoustiFruit]

I have about all the same drawbacks as elder. Worst, it ask before installing about packages selection; i clearly stated that I didn't want to install java. Yet one of the first thing it began downloading was... Java !

[NoClue!]

Lost three hours of my life trying to install in vbox................it's a coaster.