So a couple months ago I mentioned that I was running Fedora again as my primary desktop due to some problems I was having with OpenSUSE 10.3 But that I would try it again after a couple months hoping that patches will have addressed my problems. Well here we are a couple months later and I’ve installed OpenSUSE 10.3 on my primary AMD64 machine. This time through things worked the way I had expected them two a few months ago.
The initial install went perfectly as before. To me, one of the main strengths of the OpenSUSE distribution is the Yast installation program. It is simple enough to give you the super basic “Click next, next, next” install if that is what you are looking for. But at the same time it offers some powerful setup features that I really missed when I went over to Fedora. First and foremost is the ability to encrypt partitions during initial install. I do a lot of online banking and bill paying on my home computer along with email. If any of that info was compromised it wouldn’t be the end of the world but knowing that if someone burglarized my house and ran off with my computer they would never be able to boot it up on a rescue cd and reset the root password and get into my stuff is important to me. OpenSUSE makes encrypting my home partition a snap. I know that Fedora and other distros support LUKS and whatnot but from my experience OpenSUSE is the only one who offers the option during installation. A second part of the Yast installer that I really like is the granularity of the package selection. OpenSUSE is a full DVD worth of free software. There are literally thousands of packages. Like I mentioned before if you don’t want the responsibility of selecting all of your packages you can just click next, but if you do, like me, you can be very creative with your initial package selection. On Fedora and Ubuntu I am always very underwhelmed by the number of softwares I have to choose from during install. The Fedora interface seems super basic and high level. With Fedora and Ubuntu I generally spend the next hour after first boot installing a lot of packages with yum or apt-get. With OpenSUSE I generally only need to install my video driver and maybe mplayer and I am done.
One downside to OpenSUSE 10.3 is in Gnome the new Yast Software Management interface seems a little fragile to me. I really like the layout and concept they are going for but it seems to crash out with an xterm debug screen on me at random intervals. Last night I was able to make it consistently happen by clicking one of the ipod libraries from the packman repo. As soon as I would click the arrow telling it to add to my install list Yast would crash. Since this is the first time they have tried this new interface and since they made switching back to the traditional, more stable interface so easy I will give them a pass on this one.
So last time I installed OpenSUSE 10.3 my main complaint was that as soon as I installed all the Compiz-Fusion packages my desktop started running like crap and all my apps became very unstable. There must have been some updates in the last month or two because this time around it is running perfectly smooth. I have been running fusion-icon now for about 10+ hours of constant use and I haven’t had one problem. I know the whole eye-candy experience is kind of unsupported and shouldn’t really be held against the distro because it is an add-on but like I mentioned a couple months ago…I cannot live without them. And the fact that OpenSUSE makes the one-click install available on their home wiki and the packages are coming off of their repository kind of almost makes Compiz-Fusion an official package for them (not really though).
One of the other new features I really like about OpenSUSE 10.3 is how they integrated xscreensaver package into gnome-screensaver by default. It was really about time. But I would have to say that the main feature of OpenSUSE that I like better than any other distro is the Gnome slab menu. I know some people totally hate it. But honestly when I am using the traditional gnome menus it feels so archaic. Being able to right click an icon and add or remove it from startup items, the drag and drop placement along with the search integration is just really powerful to me. I’ve gotten so used to having all those cool features and using the traditional Gnome menu is teh suck. I searched like crazy for someone who had created a package for the slab menu on Fedora but I was unsuccessful.
One of the features I really like about Fedora over OpenSUSE though is how easy it was to integrate the Fuse/NTFS-3G filesystem mounting to allow me full read/write access to my WindowsXP (aka gaming) partition. I am pretty sure OpenSUSE has a similar package I just have yet to find a decent tutorial on how to set it up as easily as I did on Fedora. UPDATE 12/15: I have found a simple set of instructions here and it is working nicely now.
So those are the highlights of my latest foray into OpenSUSE 10.3. I sincerely appreciate the Fedora Project for providing me with a safe harbor while the OpenSUSE team got it’s distro into ship-shape but it looks like for now I am back in the OpenSUSE fold.
