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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Cyber Cynic

OpenSUSE 11.2 Arrives

34 comments

TAGS:desktop linux, Linux, Novell, openSUSE
IT TOPICS:Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software

I'm not going to review the latest release of openSUSE, 11.2, here. For that, you can look forward to reading my head-to-head shoot-out of Fedora 12, Ubuntu 9.10, and openSUSE 11.2 sometime soon. What I can say now though is that if you're interested in a solid, reliable desktop Linux, openSUSE 11.2 is a contender.

I've been running SUSE distributions on my desktops and servers for years now, and they've always worked well. Indeed, if you're looking for a corporate Windows desktop replacement, SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 11, openSUSE's business big brother, stands head and shoulders above the Linux desktop competition. Novell's SLED is the most strongly supported Linux business desktop offering out there.

This hints at what I've traditionally found to be the SUSE Linux's family greatest strength: stability. All the Linux distributions are more stable than their Windows rivals, but SUSE Linuxes are especially rock solid. They may not be the most cutting edge; that honor usually goes to Fedora. They may not be the most popular; that's Ubuntu of course. But, by gosh, they work and they work and they ... you get the idea. Even by Linux standards, where reboots come once or twice a year, if that, SUSE stands out.

If that sounds attractive to you, go get a copy of openSUSE 11.2. As usual with Linux, it's free.

The DVD edition defaults to using the KDE 4.3 desktop, but you also have the option of using the GNOME 2.28 desktop. There are also CD-sized versions for both desktops with support for both 32 and 64-bit processors.

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Thanks!

Submitted by DL on November 20, 2009 - 12:08 P.M.

I tried 11.2 with KDE and like it a lot.

Thanks for the article!

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Judging from the comment

Submitted by Anonymous on November 13, 2009 - 12:05 P.M.

Judging from the comment history of this blog and past entries, I must be the only person in the world who actually likes windows and never gets viruses. Windows treats me so nice and has such great applications. Linux always seems to have 100 slightly different copies of each app which all fall short in functionality, assuming you can get them working in a stable state at all. I've spent too much time tweaking source code and makefiles to get stuff to build on my system, I honestly prefer just clicking an exe and having it install. Linux needs better QC for its software but nobody wants to do it because real QA is boring and tedious work (I used to QA video games, it was a lot less fun than it sounds). Getting your computer into a working state with linux feels like a continual process where you have to fight against weirdly designed subsystems and learn the syntax for obscure configuration files which has no use outside of configuring that application. Smb.conf, fstab, crontab spring to mind and those are just a few off the top of my head. Once I get my apps installed in windows I can use them indefinetely and not worry about stuff randomly breaking.

That `stability is better on Linux` stuff is pretty specious. If you stick to console apps and daemons it's rock solid but I've had plenty of X apps bring down my entire X and make me have to restart GDM. Since when that happens you lose everything you're working on in X apps- due to all X apps running as threads to the parent X server process- it's fundamentally the same as the entire windows OS crashing, regardless if its slightly faster to get your UI operational again. People who claim linux never crashes have never filled up their memory and seen their computer swap itself to death, or they are selectively forgetting those instances. Given that QC is spotty for OSS projects and almost everything is written in C (ask any programmer, by far the easiest language to leak memory with- yay for malloc() weirdness), memory leaks are not uncommon in linux world. Amarok on kde 3.5 was probably the most egregious offender, it was a rare day when it actually worked without spilling memory all over the place. That's really a shame it was so unstable because in every other respect it was the best audio player I've ever used. Foobar2000 comes close but I still miss the functionality Amarok offered. I hear the KDE4 version sucks too and they removed the kickass interface. Openoffice seems to crash a lot every time I try it but honestly I never stick with it for very long since every time it crashes I just go back to using MS Office, plus I have a legal copy of every office product via technet so there's really no reason for me to use it. Compiz and Beryl took down X more than a few times so I turned it off. Also I wish the fonts were nicer. Dealing with the font subsystem is an exercise in frustration and odds are you wont get any nice looking fonts even after you spend weeks tuning it. Even if Adobe wanted to port their awesome creative suite to linux it would still be better on windows/OSX because of the much much larger selection of fonts available and ease of getting them working and rendered nicely.

I am very technically inclined though having used all 3 major OSes for the better part of my life, so for nontechnical users results will definitely be different. Vista was a champ for the year I ran it, Vista x64 actually gave me a big performance increase in gaming over XP32 (I benchmarked it, it was 5-10fps better in stuff like TF2 and WoW). Now Win7 is running on all my computers except a FreeBSD private webserver and slackware firewall and I couldn't be happier with my OS. No crashes even during the XP days, with 2 exceptions - ProTools is a huge beast of an app which doesnt let you run anything else simultaneously and I brought down my system running VMWare workstation and Protools at the same time. Also I had heating issues which I resolved by replacing my chassis.
I really wouldn't mind paying for MS OS'es even if I didn't get them for "free" from technet, in my opinion buying a windows license is well worth it to take advantage of the billions Microsoft spent on R&D. Since that's what you're really buying, a license to use the results of their R&D dollars. I honestly can't see any reason to go back to desktop linux ever. Occasionally I need functionality out of linux server apps, but Windows treats me so nice I have no inclination to spend my weekends googling for how to fix my sound card or get dualhead working on my laptops intel card (never could get it working on my 915gm but winxp it worked out of the box).

One thing I really like about linux that I wish was in windows is the ability to delete files when it is loaded. Linux lets you delete files even when the file is loaded into memory! It's a double edged sword not having file locking because multiple processes making changes to the same file simultaneously can be dangerous, but a lot of the time it's very convenient especially from the POV of a sysadmin (which I am). I wish they would implement that with a big warning message confirming you really want to do it.

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Judging from the comment

Submitted by Anonymous on November 13, 2009 - 6:57 P.M.

You are verbose and stupid.

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This long and full of FUD

Submitted by Felipe Sanchez on November 13, 2009 - 6:39 P.M.

This long and full of FUD bullsh*t, can only be written by a microsofty PR.

Full of lies...

Are you very productive when you have to wait 10 min. just to boot up? Ha ha, and that's just the beginning :p I don't even want to comment more on it...

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microsofty PR?!

Submitted by Anonymous on November 13, 2009 - 7:23 P.M.

Did you actually *read* the comment?!

FreeBSD server - in the top tier when it comes to out-of-the-box security and more of a challenge to maintain than Linux

Linux endpoint security - the poster uses Linux, HELLO!!

Why is it that everyone's desktop Linux experience must match your own? The poster clearly knows how to push a PC to the limits. And was honest about XP crashes.

Escape your dogma. Give FreeBSD a try this weekend. And accept the fact that some experienced and knowledgeable users prefer Windows to desktop Linux.

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Why does he has to use

Submitted by Anonymous on November 13, 2009 - 10:33 P.M.

largely inferior OS like Linux and FreeBSD ? He is so good at Windows and Microsoft products are clearly the best ever created so why didn't he run a web server and a firewall on the platform he admires so much ? How about eating some of its own dog food ?

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Re: Windows being problem less

Submitted by Peter Rasmussen on November 13, 2009 - 4:43 P.M.

I have no comments reg. your experiences with 'Linux', though it would be very nice to hear some more specific details about what distribution and package version you were having the trouble.

I did however react to the following lines:

"Windows treats me so nice and has such great applications"

My own experience is the opposite, that Windows never treated me nice and has the utmost lack of flexibility. It stands still on the most peculiar times (especially networking) and lets me down as well for example on file name issues.

"Openoffice seems to crash a lot every time I try it but honestly I never stick with it for very long since every time it crashes I just go back to using MS Office,"

I have little to no experience with OpenOffice, but MS Office Word is a crappy tool that crashes often (2003 on XP on a Dell notebook), so just from that experience MS will never get any of my money for that application!

"in my opinion buying a windows license is well worth it to take advantage of the billions Microsoft spent on R&D"

But then, you get it for free, so you think everyone else should be OK paying for it? Have you ever thought about how many million man-hours are spent on FOSS software, and that the cost of those dwarfs the money spent by Microsoft?

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Hi, OP here I think in the

Submitted by Anonymous on November 13, 2009 - 11:39 P.M.

Hi, OP here

I think in the end it's just that I'm pretty good at computers so I'll get a lot of mileage out of any platform I use. If I drop a grand on a macbook I'd make good use of it with my linux knowledge. In fact when I administrate mac servers I often write bash or perl scripts to save myself a lot of time. I can really make windows work well though because I just don't get viruses or spyware or anything. Even if I did I work in IT so removing viruses is something I do all the time and isn't a problem. If my system crashes, I figure out why and resolve it. Oddly enough, "windows just crapped out" or "bug with random windows subsystem" is very rarely among the reasons.

I could even fix your office problem most likely. Go into computer management and check event viewer for applications, then find the error message pertaining to your office crashing and plug it into google. You'll probably be able to do something with the results, more than likely you'll find numerous MS knowledgebase articles and forum posts that describe the exact issue. If you get nothing, reinstall it. Oddly these are the steps that you have to take to resolve a *LOT* of issues on Linux. We all take it for granted (since this is an IT-oriented site) that we know how to use google to solve our problems but most people don't know how to do it and thats why I get paid for it. Reading documentation is an acquired skill.

I'm not trying to sound high-and-mighty about this because it's very common knowledge for IT workers and there's a ton of them that read this site. Especially linux blogs I'm sure you are familiar with running stuff on the command line and pasting various bits from STDOUT into google.

Yeah, and it really makes me feel sorry for linux that their product isn't better. I think the problem is that instead of cooperation you have a million half-finished abandoned projects. People don't improve on existing works in Linux, they either aggressively fork it if they disagree with the developer or ignore it if the project has been abandoned by maintainer. Aren't there like ten different office suites with different functionalities? None of them are equivalent in feature sets, so theoretically the effort involved in coding one of the 'lesser' suites, maybe koffice for example, could have gone into improving OO.org. I don't mean to bash the koffice guys but I'm just illustrating one of the many examples of duplication of effort. I thought GPL was supposed to be all about sharing code so people could build on existing codebases? Many many many people packaging software for distros is another. Every single piece of software is packaged over and over for every release to accomidate a million different packaging systems. I believe the phrase is 'reinventing the wheel'. Even different versions (xp, vista, x64 versions, server 2000/2003) of windows the directory structure is essentialy the same and I don't have to even consider the differences in folder locations between distros. Like there are still distros sticking stuff in /opt even after everyone elses uses /usr. Where's this distro putting temp files? Is it /tmp? Is it ~/tmp? is it /var/tmp? Why should I care about this stuff? Why can't I have consistency in the Linux experience like I do with windows and mac? It's not that im incapable of dealing with these problems, it's that I don't want to.

Again another problem is insufficient QA. I've downloaded so many projects that I found off freshmeat that either took major amounts of sourceforge/site forum searching or I just was unable to make it work at all. I'm pretty familiar with the concept of dependency hell from this but it did give me an idea for the general quality and overall lifespan (from creation to abandonment) of linux software. A general rule: the server apps range from okay to great, and the GUI desktop apps typically leave something to be desired.

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Actually, I'm not impressed!

Submitted by Peter Rasmussen on November 13, 2009 - 10:41 A.M.

I downloaded it and attempted to install and get a good desktop going, but I ran into similar problems as with Mandriva:

1.Flexibility of configuring X correctly is bad.
2.Flexibility of configuring boot is bad.
3.Flexibility of the network while installing is bad.

My present system is Slackware, using Lilo, static IP configuration and with a monitor that will do at least 1600x1200x80Hz (ViewSonic P225f), but:

Ad.1. I'm always given a display of 1024x768x60Hz that can only be increased by manually editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf, because the setup can't detect my monitor. And in this last Suse I can't even run xvidtune because it can't detect it!?!?

Ad.2.Grub seems to only recognize other Grub partitions and this time the boot sector was overwritten without asking me first!? I then have to boot up with my own or a Slackware rescue/install disk to change it back to what I want. I can from there add whatever other partition I want booted, incl. Mandriva or Suse.

Ad.3.It seems that checking for updates of the installation that is being done, is problematic if DHCP isn't the method. No plan B of eg. using a static IP somewhere.

So, it isn't without pain if the setup doesn't exactly match their expectations. No 'Advanced Users' method or something.

I'm not impressed!

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