An In-Depth Look at openSUSE 11.3

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Since it's been quite a while since I last took openSUSE for a spin, I couldn't resist downloading the 11.3 release that came out in mid-July. To see how the distro fares today, I installed it onto my home PC and used it for just over a week. So, read on for an in-depth look at what's new and notable, and also for my experiences.

You can read our in-depth look at openSUSE 11.3 here and discuss it here!
 

Greg King

I just kinda show up...
Staff member
Solid read Rob. It's nice to see that the regulars in the distro community are still releasing quality software. At any point did you feel that this could replace your Gentoo install or is that still your flavor of choice?
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
For desktop Linux, no, I'll stick with Gentoo. For the notebook though, openSUSE -might- replace Ubuntu. I plan on doing some testing soon to see if that'll be the case. I think it has a good chance to do that.

I might move from Gentoo at some point, but I can't see it happening soon to be honest. The reason I like the distro so much is that it's almost completely DIY. You build it up from scratch, so rather than have a bunch of kernel modules loaded that you don't need, and having tons of software packages installed that you'll never touch, you build it up slowly and it's essentially YOUR OS.

I really have a hard time installing a distro and seeing all of the software installed that I know I'll never use... and to uninstall it would take a while. It's the same thing with Windows, really. Just take a look at ALL the software installed, much of which will never be touched by most people. It's not just the installed software though, Gentoo offers a lot of great OS tools that make the experience better. I like the Portage package manager as a whole as well... it's gotten quite good over the years.

I treat notebooks a little bit differently, because there, I don't use the distro as main OS, so simpler is far better than complicated. Gentoo isn't always complicated per se, but for a notebook, it seems a bit needless, given you need to compile most everything. That just isn't necessary really, so for me, a distro like openSUSE or Ubuntu is just fine.
 
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