nixCraft

I've been using Linux for many years & used to use SUSE back when it was still exclusively owned by the German company. However, I haven't touched it since until about 5 days ago.

I've used Debian, or some distribution thereof, almost exclusively. But, being a true *nix geek, I thought I would give openSUSE a try. I'm currently writing this on openSUSE 10.3.

It has a beautiful installation procedure! I was truly impressed with the installation scheme. Although I am partial to curses-based installation scripts, I thought openSUSE's was simply designed with enough options to satisfy the average poweruser. It did a nice job of selecting the package dependencies, although feedback was slim, I was able to verify that a the needed dependencies were installed.

It automatically detected my audio, video, wireless & wired cards. Although most distros nowadays will do this, I still appreciate the effort people put in to developing the detection tools. I can wrestle with the particulars (i.e., it detected my monitor as "vesa" when it is really an LG W22), which I don't mind, since it's pretty much fine-tuning a system. In the case of my monitor settings, it worked as detected, although it looked odd.

I liked the GNOME desktop installed. I'm a GNOME fan & have been for years. I haven't tried the KDE yet, but will most likely get it up & running soon. I did not like, however, their menu. After about 5 choices, I had to click on the "more programs" button which would open up a flat-screen choice of icons. I fixed that as soon as I could, it was irritating.

All in all, I am impressed. I'm not sure if this will become my OS of choice... I'll continue to try it out & see what I like & don't like about it. I'm not a fancy GUI-type person, so I'm heading back to a lightweight manager; the nice thing for openSUSE is that it leaves all the great command line options (like chkconfig) that a few distros take out & force you to use the GUI.