First Impressions of openSUSE 11.2

I’ve been testing openSUSE 11.2 for the past couple of months. Now that Release Candidate 1 is available, with the final feature set and look and feel, I’ll share my impressions.

Look and Feel

The thing I like most about openSUSE is that the developers have gone to great lengths to enhance the Linux desktop experience. Whether you use KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDE or IceWM, you’ll find more or less familiar color schemes, generally in restful shades of green and grey. If you think this doesn’t matter, try looking for eight hours at the bright blue Fedora default desktop, or the default brown Ubuntu desktop with its jangling orange highlights. Pretty much every Linux distro I’ve used over the years has required extensive desktop customization except this one.

And you’ll also find a layout mostly familiar to Windows users. The major desktops all have a “Panel” at the bottom, and a “Start” menu is in the lower left corner on all of them. With 11.2, openSUSE has declared that KDE 4.3.2 is the default desktop. This has been somewhat controversial, but I haven’t found it to be an issue. Finally, all of the major desktop applications have been updated, and openSUSE 11.2 has Novell enhancements to some of them. Firefox is at 3.5.3, Open Office is at 3.1.1 and Evolution is at 2.28.0.

System Administration

YaST just keeps getting better! The two things I like most about openSUSE when compared to all the other community distros are the look and feel of the desktops and the ease of system administration with YaST. I haven’t looked at Fedora or Ubuntu in the current round of testing, but in the testing I did a year ago, YaST was significantly easier to use than either Fedora or Ubuntu.

The most noticeable improvement in YaST for 11.2 is the preview of a web-based interface. While I’m sure some server administrators enjoy the power of the command line, I personally don’t like having to remember or look up all that stuff, which, of course, varies from distro to distro. Nor do I want to install a VNC server just for a GUI system administration tool. So a web-based YaST is a big win for me.

Rough Spots

The main rough spots on any Linux distro are going to be graphic cards, audio and wireless. Audio worked out of the box on both my laptop and workstation with 11.2 RC1. Wireless mostly works, although you still have to go outside the distro repositories to get some drivers, and there are some minor setup glitches with the KDE Network Manager applet on a WEP network. I have so far only tested the default open source drivers for my graphics cards.

Other rough spots: VMware Workstation requires some extra attention to install, but it does work once you’ve done that. I found some dependency issues installing the Rosegarden sequencer. That’s about it for rough spots now.

Performance

Stay tuned! I haven’t run through any of my detailed performance tests yet, and I don’t typically compare distros, just versions of openSUSE and various tuning parameter options. Performance tests I am planning to run are

• iozone, comparing 11.1/ EXT3, 11.2 / EXT3 and 11.2 / EXT4 with default settings,
• iozone, comparing Xen and KVM virtualization on 11.2 with EXT4, and
• Memory requirements of all the major desktops.