Aronzak’s Rantings

OpenSUSE 11 22 November, 2008

Having been disappointed by Ubuntu 8.10, I moved on to Fedora. Absolute failure. Looked ok, couldn’t set up a network connection. Fro some reason, /bin and /sbin were not in root’s $PATH, so for a moment I was unable to run dhclient and ifconfig. Don’t have a clue why that was. Next, I tried the Red Hat admin GUIs. Why they are GUIs, escapes me. you have to type system-config-x, as there is stupidly system-install-packages and system-control-network, so no tab completion for you. This is exceptionally stupid, as the former is just the program pirut, and the latter is a form of system-config-network. Why there are two escapes me. On the plus side, the graphical installer (anaconda) was good, and the startup display is quite good. It also has a nice gdm setup that does away with usernames (you click on your icon then enter a password).

Next, up, OpenSUSE. This has a very nice version of the old installer, which, on newer hardware, actually runs decently. The installer is very clean with a green and silvery look. On the downside, however, it suffers from the same problems as before. Partitioning is a mess. Surprise surprise, I don’t want to wipe my disc. To get custom partitioning, you have to click on a drop box, then click on partitioning. It’s something most people would want to configure, yet is bundled with useless options in a hard to access location. No warning is given that it is going to format a disk, except for small red text, so noobs could easily just click through and not realise until it is too late that they are going to lose data. That one really should have been addressed by now. Also, even though I am installing from a DVD, it has a funny box that lists the installation media that are in use, along with a total. Looks a bit stupid. The install is extremely slow, compared to others.

Now I start to remember why I dislike Suse. First, it makes you except a EULA. I feel dirty whenever I have to do this. It also makes you accept one for Firefox, something that caused a furore in the Ubuntu crowd.

Next, it comes without nano. This is highly annoying as nano is my primary editor.

Thirdly, it bundles a desktop search called kerry beagle. This may be usefull for some users, but this really should be opt-in, rahter than a difficult opt-out. Somewhere, there should be an explicit option to enable or disable it. It caches the user’s home directory, as well as keeping all of firefox’s web history. Also, even in KDE 3.5, it bundles the stupid ugly menu, which Novell made. Though, it is easy to go back to the getter ‘classic’ menu.

Fourth, it gave me the hostname linux-th98. Whatever the hell that is. I don’t remember a choice. Ubuntu handles this by making the domain username-laptop or somehting, which works fairly well for some.

Fifth, yast blows. Yast2 (graphical) is a pain, and the non graphical one is really difficult to work with (Imagine a UI where instead of having a mouse, you press tab.) I wanted to eliminate the beagle group, but there is no groups settings that I found, other than user 1000. The Gnome settings dialogues are more useful. Flowing from this is that files such as fstab and menu.lst are expected to be edited in a stupid GUI (even though they’re text) and so there is no clean tab format.

So. All in all not too bad, as I can’t find too many things to complain about. Most of these are my personal preference. There are other things that have good defaults, like the screensaver and kdm theme. I’ll hang onto this one for a while if I can figure out how to blast beagle off the face of the Earth.

On the black machine, Suse wins. But generally, I would say that Ubuntu wins thus far for ordinary users. Of cource, Debian is the natural choice for those in the know.