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Coverage of openSUSE 11.0 launch
(6 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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It’s still early after the launch, but I think we’ve been pretty successful in getting the word out about openSUSE. Here’s what I’m seeing on the Internet the Monday after the launch:
- LinuxPlanet’s Dan Lynch takes a look at KDE4 in openSUSE 11.0 and finds it “a good improvement on openSUSE 10.3.”
- An interview over on InternetNews with Sean Michael Kerner.
- Another over on BetaNews.
- Coverage on The Inquirer, noting that the server was “borked” when they tried to reach it. (Try again, guys!) Not surprising, we had huge server load immediately after the official release. (And before, actually — people really wanted a shot at the download…)
- Another write-up on ZDNet.co.uk.
- Builder.au announces the release.
- DistroWatch has some kind words and statistics about 11.0:
It is illustrated in the table below, which ranks the major distribution releases according to the number of unique hits their respective pages received during the first three days after the release. As can be seen, with over 16,500 unique hits, openSUSE 11.0 is second only to Ubuntu in terms of post-release interest in the distribution among the DistroWatch visitors. - openSUSE 11.0 also got a glowing review from DownloadSquad:
OpenSUSE has always been a strong option for new Linux users, and users who wanted a distribution they could grow with. We always had a few reservations about recommending it, mainly because of speed and package handling issues. OpenSUSE has made monstrous strides in these areas between the 10.3 release and today. - Also a nice review on Linux.com:
openSUSE 11.0 is a fabulous release. The pretty new graphics set the stage for significant improvements under the surface. All the time and energy put into the package management system has paid off. Including KDE 4 is not as big of a risk for openSUSE as it might be for other major distributions because of the conservative and intuitive way KDE 4 is set up. openSUSE has given me hope that I could actually like KDE 4.
There’s quite a lot more out there — I’ll be posting more comprehensive roundups shortly.Feel free to leave links to coverage in the comments — I don’t want to miss anything!
Here is one:
It is not in english but it puts openSUSE in very good light.
I have have been using openSUSE 11 over the past few days and while there is a lot to like I really feel that the KDE4 desktop should have been marked beta as the few users (in additional to myself) I have tried it on have run into numerous issues.
Let’s start with the bad:
KDE4
Many people used to KDE3 are confusing the show desktop button on KDE4 down at the bottom left with a start terminal button. This then leads to confusion as few know (or understand) what the dashboard is.
The KDE4 Konsole background colours seemingly cannot be made to stick. Going to Settings -> Edit Current Profile… | Appearance and choosing “Black on Light Yellow”, then pressing Apply, followed by OK changes the colours for all open konsoles. If you then close ALL konsole windows and then go start a new konsole again the background will have reverted back to grey on black.
You can no longer rearrange menu items by dragging them as in KDE3’s kickoff menu.
The system tray is very glitchy and often has background/refresh issues.
Upon starting krandrtray and left clicking the icon that appears you are presented with a window that lets you change resolutions etc. However when you choose a different resolution nothing happens. There is no readily noticeable apply/OK buttons either so I have no idea how this window is supposed to work (please note that pressing the right mouse button on the icon pops up a menu that DOES work).
Multimedia keybindings are not set by default (e.g. volume up/down/mute keys do not work). The brightness keys did work though.
Moving panel icons is no longer a middle mouse button drag operation. There is a fairly painful start moving, make sure icon is in the right place and immediately pop up window then go to stop moving operation.
The KDE network applet seems to show a slither of a blue bar on previously used APs that are not in range.
Double clicking on a toolbar now shades windows by default which is a change from KDE3.
Multiple monitors do not seem to be handled well with things like the SUSE menu at the bottom left of the right hand monitor appearing at the right hand side of the left hand monitor when opened.
Trying to copy and paste a file between Dolphin windows does not work.
Dragging a file out of an archive an on to the desktop results in a shortcut to the file in archive rather than copying it to the desktop.
Network manager on PPTP wireless network
For reasons I don’t yet know NetworkManager-pptp is not included in the stock repositories. This proved a deal breaker for people who use their laptops at the University where I work (and they have been waiting some time for this in KDE after seeing it readily available in Ubuntu’s GNOME).
FAM
Using famd with a SLES10 server did not have the expected behaviour with nautilus or dolphin. Doing touch newfile ~/Desktop/ via ssh on the server did not result in a new icon appearing within a nautilus or dolphin window looking at the Desktop folder.
System Hang
).
The system would completely lockup (not even sysrq would work) periodically forcing hard reboots. Thanks to the Novell bugzilla I was able to learn about this problem (reiserfs and user_xattr) so you already know about this. Thank you for having an open bug tracker – I wish more companies had bug trackers that could be anonymously searched (although I am sad that bugs found by Enterprise customers are often unviewable by me (and this comes from someone who has paid for SLES 10 but that’s a different issue)
The good
The installer looks extremely slick and seems to work fairly quickly.
The package manager is extremely fast when it comes to solving dependencies now. I’m not sure but it might be even more robust than previously too. Absolutely outstanding so far.
64 bit machines seem to use tickless kernels now so battery life seems a bit better.
KDE seems to handle the dimming of the backlight properly when coming back from a screen blank.
Suspend to RAM seems more robust.
The widgets have potential.
Firefox 3 is definitely faster than Firefox 2.
The compiz integration is much much smoother than in 10.3.
There’s definitely interesting stuff in this openSUSE but there are some real issues that cause grief. Not a version for new or inexperienced users but there’s promise for future distro releases…