openSUSE is my new Ubuntu -- My review of openSUSE 11 KDE 4

On the 19th of June, the release date of openSUSE 11, I joined everyone else to download it. I downloaded the KDE4 version, as I had heard it was very good. So, I stuck it into my laptop. Great new design. It quickly booted up and instead of the default KDE4 theme I was greeted with a more interesting grey theme called Aya. I didn't want to explore on the live CD so I immediately installed it. After about 20-30 mins, it was done. That's about the same or faster than Ubuntu! I rebooted onto the real system and then...the wireless wasn't working! After fiddling around with the networking area of YaST I somehow got it to work. After updates to KNetworkManager, everything seems to be a lot better.

Since I like "living on the edge", I decided to update to KDE 4.1 SVN. A repo is provided, which is updated weekly. I was quickly up to date with it. It was sooo much faster than 10.3 could ever be. When I rebooted I was greeted with an even more beautiful login screen. Then when I logged in, everything was so...I was at home again Yes, KDE 4.1 is home for me, even if it is unstable and buggy (for me it isn't ).

Here's my review then.

Looks

openSUSE has always has that "professional" look. It's always been known as the best looking KDE distro and the KDE 4 version is no exception. The Aya theme gives it a less "Vistaish" look (not black, black everywhere) and makes it unique from other distros. YaST has had a makeover as well. It now features Oxygen icons. The splashy theme (yes they've stopped using bootsplash now ), KDM theme, gfx GRUB theme and installer have all been revamped to look even more professional. The only bad thing I've found is that the fonts are absolutely horrible. Nothing seems to fix it, and apparently, it's a Qt problem. It doesn't affect Gnome. They get nice crisp subpixel hinted fonts

Speed

openSUSE has always been seen as "very bloated" and "really slow". Those days are over. I can say that openSUSE is very, very fast. Booting up takes around the same time as Ubuntu now, which is pretty good considering it used to sometimes take minutes to start. The package management has vastly improved. Although not as user friendly as pacman or APT (I have good experience with both) it is a lot faster now, and can compete with APT.

Hardware detection

openSUSE 11 detected all of my hardware fine (since it is very Linux compatible), except the wireless didn't work out of the box as I expected. Intel wireless should work, but for some strange reason I had to fiddle about with the network settings in YaST. After quite a few reboots I finally managed to get it working. The culprit was KNetworkManager 0.7. It's not as nice as the old one, but mostly does it's job.

Hardware acceleration worked perfectly (since it's Intel graphics) but for my computer with ATI graphics...not so much. I had to do quite a lot with it until it worked..we'll see what happens with my nVidia graphics card when I get the RAM stick replaced. The resolution was detected as well.

Suspend works ok, except sometimes KPowersave complains about not being able to unmount external media. I haven't tried hibernate, as I hardly ever use it anyway, so it wouldn't matter if it doesn't work for me.

Sound also worked fine for me, but for my other computer it didn't. I needed to tick some box in the mixer...

Printer

My printer requires the foo2hp drivers so I had to install them manually, like I do for just about every distro I've used. Most other people could set theirs up through the printer configuration module in YaST pretty easily.

Codecs

Codecs were easy enough to install. Just use the one click installer found on the openSUSE website.

All in all, I think openSUSE is a great Linux distro for "Linux newbies" and the new version is a lot faster and even better looking. I'd happily recommend openSUSE 11 (with KDE4, not Gnome - the Gnome one isn't as nice as the KDE one. Use Ubuntu if you want Gnome )