high on solder

OpenSUSE 11.0 was released last week and I have been trying it out on my Dell XPS m1330 using the Gnome & KDE LiveCDs as well as installing it on my Athlon64 based desktop. As far as features go I really like openSUSE. The DVD installer is particularly good, allowing the user to pick exactly which packages they wish to install. This is something I wish Ubuntu did as well. I also liked openSUSE's implementation of Compiz-Fusion desktop effects. Instead of relying solely on the comprehensive but confusing Advanced Compiz Configuration application like Ubuntu, openSUSE has another much simpler Desktop Effects application that provides simple check boxes and drop down menus to configure the most commonly used options.

Aside from these high points I was fairly disappointed with openSUSE. The navigation menus in both Gnome & KDE are overly cluttered, confusing, and often redundant. Why have a menu item for Internet with a sub-menu labeled Web Browser that only contains one entry for Firefox? If the distribution had multiple browsers installed I could understand their reasoning; but why not leave this sort of configuration to the user as Ubuntu does? The KDE interface is especially clunky, to the point of being almost unusable. I have never been a fan of KDE and I realize that KDE 4 is far from finished but nothing I have seen has come close to swaying my view that Gnome is still the best GUI for Linux. Similar to my views on Gnome vs KDE, my opinion of non Debian based distributions of Linux has also not changed. The combined benefits of broad support and flexibility are unsurpassed as evidenced in the absence of very common software packages from the openSUSE repositories. OpenSUSE also did not resolve any of the issues I had with Ubuntu 8.04, namely the CPU scaling issue. While the suspend-resume worked fine, the second CPU core still runs at full speed when the system is resumed.

While openSUSE 11.0 is certainly not a bad distribution of Linux, it just isn't for me. The quality and level of detail afforded by the installer make this a better choice for a more customized application, such as a server, than for a desktop. The DVD installer includes whole sections of server software for just such a task. The hardware support was very good and was at least comparable to Ubuntu 8.04.