An often-overlooked Linux distribution (likely due to being purchased by Novell, whom many self-professed Linux users find a reason to detest) is openSUSE; a free distribution, supported and partially developed by Novell.

I tend to be fairly software-eclectic: I’ll try anything once, because chances are – I will see it again. I can hold my own with RedHat distributions, Debian distributions, various forms of BSD, and, now, I have finally cut my teeth on SUSE. The last time I looked at SUSE, it was Slackware based, only, in German.

The times have truly changed. It’s certainly no Slackware.

I burned a Live CD of openSUSE 10.3, and stuck it into my Vostro 1400. It just.. worked. It booted, and I was in a KDE menu with my wireless online within 20 seconds.

(Not even the famed “easy to use” Ubuntu worked properly on the initial boot/install of this machine: Ubuntu screwed up the video settings, installing a VESA driver, and somehow managed to wedge itself when trying to load the ipw3945 wireless driver. Then, when I decided I wanted to be able to ‘sleep’ the laptop, I had to make my own ACPI scripts; none of those included with Ubuntu would work.)

Feeling a bit cocky, I took it upstairs to boot on my “brand new” (six months old) Inspiron 530 Quad Core based desktop. Not only did it work (although for obvious reasons, it used the open source driver rather than the proprietary NVidia one by default), but it saw that I had placed a $20 TV card into a PC slot, so it automatically put KDETV in my applications menu. How cool is that? I had to reload the module with the proper card, and tuner id – which took about 5 seconds in YaST2. I spent about two hours figuring all of the system settings, V4L2 drivers, etc, prior to it to work before. Wow. What else can this do?

I have not used the GNOME release of openSUSE, as I love the elegance – and the fact that KDE applications are closely tied together, not only with the desktop, but themselves. openSUSE has it’s own menu that’s fired off of kicker (one right click away from the usual KDE menu), which is pretty damn useful when you get used to it. It’s like having QuickSilver built into kicker.

Now, the bad side of openSUSE:

The package management system is so overengineered, it’s pathetic. Each subsystem can have it’s own repository for any purpose; I have one specifically for ‘Wine’, and another for ‘Mutt’. That seems a bit much. Your package management system doesn’t need to be a gateway to SVN, nor should it be. It’s slow. Zypper is so damn slow, it took 30 seconds to look for new patches with a very modest set of repositories. There is a secondary tool that can be installed, and used, called ‘smart’, which is somewhat similar to ‘apt-get’ on Debian systems. It is much, much faster, but non standardized upon, yet.

There’s no real way to ‘upgrade’ between versions. The official stance of many openSUSE users is to ‘Have /home on a new partition, format the rest, and start over.’ It’s not 1996; there’s no reason we should need to do this.

Everything is customized, sometimes it’s in an odd way. The Apache2 distribution in openSUSE is beyond pedantic: It’s obnoxious to configure with their distribution layout.

Everything important is controlled by a combination of shell scripts, and messy GUI utilities. If you don’t do it from YaST, you’ll do it in YaST2. There is no other option. You are now part of the YaST borg.

The polished applications and care put into the system still outshine the above issues; if openSUSE gets a managable packaging system that mortals can use – it might just make it. If you haven’t already, try it out. You might just like it. I did, and I am now without a Debian based system in my office for the first time in years.