opensuse
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Nov 21, 2009 2:31 AM EDT |
I haven't look at SUSE since it was SuSE. I've been using openSUSE this week and am impressed. It has a polish and completeness that makes most distros look like half-baked cobble jobs. (Thinkpad T61, it even supports the fingerprint reader thingy). KDE4 has a lot of annoying quirks. All that fuss and raving over plasmoids and cashews, and then they don't do anything. It also seems to be falling into the Gnome trap of making you click a billion times for simple jobs because they have a law that no configuration menu can have more than one option. Or you have to do like in computer games where your character has to navigate monsters and multiple levels to find a key, and then navigate more monsters and multiple levels to open a door. For example, in old KDE you could click on the clock or calendar and have a complete set of configurations. But not in KDE4, noooo, you get two braindead options on clock-click, and have to go digging into the system configuration menu to find the rest. At least there are more. But I digress. Stephen Fry wrote a great column on the degenerate level of much Internet commentary, 'Stephen Fry attacks 'malevolent' comments following Twitter spat' http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/nov/20/stephen-fry-... ""I don't know about you but whenever I read a blog I do not let my eye drop below half the screen in case I accidentally hit the bit where the comments reside. Of all the stinking, sliding, scuttling, weird, entomological creatures that inhabit the floor of the internet those comments on blogs are the most unbearable, almost beyond imagining," I couldn't have said it better. Not even close :) |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 21, 2009 10:28 AM EDT |
Ah, what a fantastic read. Stephen Fry really does have a wonderful way with words. |
| caitlyn Nov 21, 2009 11:17 AM EDT |
The issue here isn't whether or not openSUSE works well on some hardware. I said that it probably would in the conclusion of my review. The issue here is how the community reacts to a less than stellar review. The openSUSE developers get this right. The community has a large, vocal, fanatic minority who are ready to lynch anyone who writes a bad word about their favorite distro. This sort of fanaticism and zealotry is what the article is about. Now, since tc brought up how openSUSE works... Unfortunately, on my HP Mini 110, openSUSE is seriously broken. This is a release which touted netbook support. Anyway.... Some distros like Fedora and Slackware ignore the Broadcom wireless chipset which needs a proprietary driver. Others, like Ubuntu and Mandriva Free recognize it, let you know you need a proprietary driver, and offer the option to download and install it. Either approach is fine by me. openSUSE recognized the chipset and attempts to load an incorrect driver. This causes both the live CD and the installer to lock up and fail to boot. Unless you know enough to pass an option to the kernel blacklisting the incorrect driver you are SOL. The Broadcom chips remain popular so this really is an issue. Next, KDE, at least on my HP, is seriously unstable with all sorts of application crashes. I occasionally get a system lock-up instead of a crash. It's really, really, really annoying. If I wanted unstable I'd run Vista. Netbook support? Only if you like your dialog boxes to be too large for the screen. Other distros get this right. Why can't openSUSE? If you don't go through and customize your desktop and/or know to use the Alt+mouse trick this is going to go beyond annoying. There are plenty of other little annoyances and bugs but those are the two big ones. LWN also had a review which concluded that waiting until 11.3 might be a good idea. |
| tuxchick Nov 21, 2009 9:24 PM EDT |
I wasn't disputing your opensuse review, Caitlyn, just taking the rambling road to agreeing about the degenerating level of reader commentary on the intertubes. It's pretty sad. Brand x is pretty good, but for some reason the brand x blog attracts the psycho-dorks in large herds. I delete as many comments as I approve, and you know what? It feels darned good. |
| caitlyn Nov 21, 2009 9:31 PM EDT |
I'm actually pleased to say I've only had to delete one on Entropy today and none on O'Reilly since I wrote this piece. The level of comments has been much better than expected. |
| number6x Nov 22, 2009 1:35 PM EDT |
I was a very long time SuSE user. They suffered greatly after the Novell purchase. KDE suffered as well. SuSE was a huge contributor to KDE development. Open SUSE seems to have found its own legs, and like fedora, I hope for good things from such a good distro. |
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