OpenSuse 10.3: How does it compare to LinuxMint?

[hairy_Palms]

i only have one statement about opensuse 10.3, even slower than 10.1, as if that was possible... what the hell do suse do to their distro to make it run so dog slow?

[D.B.]

I'm sure I'd like it more if the GUI worked. I'm serious, I clicked on every icon, button and bar I could find and nothing happened. When I restarted everything worked except the menu button, I left my PC for about 30 minutes, come back and the PC is idling and the menu still hasn't opened. I figured that the thing had crashed, crashing shortly after boot up twice in a row is pretty damn appalling.

[exploder]

OpenSuse 10.3 would only load for me in "safe graphics mode", so no pretty boot splash for me. The first attempt to install I chose to enable the extra repo's, big mistake! After 2 hours I started the install over and just used the default repo, 40 minutes later it was installed.

OpenSuse didn't really look all that great... The "Slab" menu was a pain to use. The splash screens for the applications were dull and boring.

OpenSuse did run well on my hardware but would have taken a lot of extra work to get things as they should be.

OpenSuse stayed on my test drive about 3 hours before I wiped it out.

[oblivion02]

OpenSuse 10.3 is a great distribution. I used it for some time, has pretty good hardware detection, automounts, very nice KDE setup, boot time is pretty fast, and has a decent community. I was very close to keeping it as my main Desktop distribution, but I had a few set backs with wireless, since I have a broadcom chipset, and I decided to try out a few other distributions. I did not like the stupid lizzard either. Tried about 7 other distributions, slackware based, gentoo, etc, but none really cought my attention. Ubuntu had done pretty good with me, but I did not like the feel of ubuntu either. THen I tried Linux Mint, and I actually love it. How easy wireless setup was became a total turn on. I also like the fact that its ubuntu based[which means debian based], and very community driven. To me, Linuz Mint wins OpenSuse 10.3 by alot. I see Mint as an upcoming distribution, with alot of future. I know it will eventually continue evolving as a distribution, and the fact that it is very community driven is very appealing. I recommend Linux Mint over Suse anyday.

-Oblivion

[miraceti]

I have been using LM Daryna for a while, since the beta 21 was released and have installed the final version Main edition on a test hdd.

I have previously used Opensuse 10.3 on my AMD 64 as it worked well on the 64 bit machine which is my main work computer.

After putting LM through its paces on the AMD64 I have now decided to blow away the opensuse 10.3 installation and use LM in its place. My reasons for the change are many, but one that was really driving my crazy was the time it took for the yast package manager to initialize its online repos each and every time I wanted to install a package. I would literally go and get a cup of coffee while I waited for it to initialize and that is on an 8 Meb adsl line too!

Without boring you by writing a book, LM works absolutely perfectly on my AMD 64 XP3000 with a Radeon X300HM video card, and by perfectly I mean perfect, straight from install! Sound, Network, Video including 3D, Multimedia, Printer, in fact I have not found a single problem with it! Not to mention how great apt-get is !

btw as I write this I am backing up my data from the 10.3 installation in preparation for blowing it away.

Linux Mint is how Linux should be, in my opinion.

[kevmille]

I prefer Debian and Linux Mint over openSUSE 10.3. Yast is just an awful package manager. I even have some devout SUSE friends overseas who got so frustrated with Yast breaking everything, they decided to switch to Ubuntu. The Vietnam BSD/Linux Mirror is running SLES but the next server will probably run FreeBSD or CentOS.

[67GTA]

Opensuse still has not fixed their dependency problems. I upgraded to KDE to 3.5.9, and then tried to install Gnome desktop. It was not possible anymore because of the repo conflicts. They are going to have to put more apps that people want in the default repos. It runs fine with the default. As soon as you start adding community repos, things start falling apart. I just finally deleted the partition. The funny thing is, I installed KDE with the KDE CD installer. If I had installed Gnome at the same time, things would have been fine, but I would not have been able to upgrade to KDE 3.5.9. The "one click install" made me try opensuse again, but it wasn't enough to make me stay. They have unify their repos!!! Other than that, it is the most professional, best looking distro out there. I'll stick with deb based distros.

[clem]

I like the SUSE project and I find there's always a lot to learn from what they're doing. They came with the idea of the slab menu and although I don't like their implementation of it, it's thanks to them that we now have mintMenu. They also innovated a lot in the artwork domain and the integration with the control center... with every new SUSE release I always think "I don't like to run that thing.. but gosh... isn't that new feature neat!". They're probably working on Giver right now and we don't have anything similar in the Debian world

For me it's not among the desktops I would use or recommend but it's definitely an interesting project and it contributes greatly to make Linux in general a better desktop OS.

Clem

[MagnusB]

Opensuse still has not fixed their dependency problems. I upgraded to KDE to 3.5.9, and then tried to install Gnome desktop. It was not possible anymore because of the repo conflicts. They are going to have to put more apps that people want in the default repos. It runs fine with the default. As soon as you start adding community repos, things start falling apart. I just finally deleted the partition. The funny thing is, I installed KDE with the KDE CD installer. If I had installed Gnome at the same time, things would have been fine, but I would not have been able to upgrade to KDE 3.5.9. The "one click install" made me try opensuse again, but it wasn't enough to make me stay. They have unify their repos!!! Other than that, it is the most professional, best looking distro out there. I'll stick with deb based distros.

I find a CD install of OpenSuSE to be unstable and lacking features. And the liveCD's for 10.3 didn't have any sound on any of my laptops (a HP and a Lenovo). Still, I really like it, YaST and SaX are the two main reasons for using OpenSuSE.
The only real con is zypper. It is a bit slow, the updater have some issues running a solver (I had to run zypper and manually force to run a solver so I could update the system), and the repo jungle can be a bit confusing for the average user. I would like to see the packman, VideoLAN and nVidia/ATi repos enable by default (some depending on hardware). Also, for anyone thinking about installing 10.3, this is a must see.