So I love gentoo, however on a desktop computer which I will using for Uni it was a little high maintenance. I wanted to try something new so I gave Fedora 11 a go, which failed, so a work mate got me a copy of OpenSUSE.
The hardest part of the install was working out it’s partitioning tool and not getting it to touch my second drive, which had Windows and backups on it. I did finally get it to work, but for some reason it thought 15GB was enough room for me. That’s not a huge problem because I just extended the LVM after the install.
Once install, installing the ATI drivers using the one click installer was wonderful (however I did have to click more than once). Compiz fusion was easy enabled and networking (WPA) was a breeze to setup in YaST. The general look and feel wasn’t quite right, so as usual I modified to my liking.
OpenSUSE for me has achieved my goal as the required amount of terminal use is minimal. I have installed several apps without any problems and it’s been wonderful to use.
What is the biggest differences between SUSE and say, Debian or Gentoo? How is package management? Support good?
Precompiled binaries which is installed using yum, although it’s very transparent yast installer. As for differences, there aren’t too many. The control panel (once again yast) is a lot nicer compared to Deb and Gentoo, however most gnu/linux distros have gotten to a point where the only thing different is file layout, package management and what’s installed.
One thing I don’t like is in the Gnome OpenSuse, they have a weird menu bar, which just annoys me. It’s hard to use which makes the normal gnome bar much better.
Maybe I’ll give it a go over Debian on my next desktop install then. I’m really looking for a distro that plays nicely with laptop hardware and WPA.
I have been using openSUSE for a while now. It plays nice with most linux apps. Even Samba shares and network shared printers work well with openSUSE. At this stage the only reason why I hang on to my Windows XP box is for the Games that I can’t get to work on Linux. 2 thumbs up to Steam who are doing a good job of bridging the gap!