Much of my response has been in fact aimed at my personal opinions of certain features, and while a few of the failures I noted were indeed things that bugged me, they were personal preference and thus, I will be revising my scoring system a little. In fact, how I will award points will not so much be based upon personal preference unless its completely unbearable to me. And to that end, I’ll make a new PREFERENCES section, which will not receive scores, but will have things I personally like or dislike.

In addition, I so appreciate all of the comments I’ve received, many were very helpful in pointing out errors in my representation of openSUSE. Others were part of the reason I decided to change the scoring a bit. And even others I’d like to take the time to reply:

First, to my friend Heartsbane, thanks for the smartass reply. I should’ve known it was coming!

Sontek pointed out that there were bugs in the iwlwifi driver when 10.3 was released. While I agree with not releasing something before its ready, I find it interesting that 2 months after its release openSUSE doesn’t have iwlwifi drivers available in their updates. Why is this? Did I miss them somewhere? My problems with the ipw3945 are more to the fact that it never seems to work with the WPA PSK setup I have at home/work. The iwlwifi driver has less issues with this specific problem.

apokryphos had several comments, and I will address a few of them.

1. The 1-click-install feature is to help reduce much of the repo setup and installation that used to be a long drawn out process has been reduced to 1 click. While I agree that this is a major improvement, it is such a misnomer to call it a 1-click-install when it clearly isn’t. I only suggest we rename the process as someone coming from another world to Linux who find openSUSE may be disappointed when a 1-click-install indeed requires more like 7 clicks.
2. zypper shows what will be installed was another response I received contrary to what I saw. He asked me for an example, and in return I would suggest that indeed it does tell you what will be installed, but only after you agree to install the extra dependencies. Please provide me a command/option that shows me the dependencies prior to my agreement to install the package(s).
3. The root prompt was another failure on my end, however. Mostly, I have it ingrained in my head to look for the “root” part in the prompt. The entire prompt indeed turns red as suggested, this is something I just have to get used to, or change to my preference I guess. I do still think the prompt is ugly, but its growing on me. Others mentioned this as well, thanks for pointing out this to me.

Another, which I received from Ani and lejocelyn (as well as apokryphos), was in regard to my complaint about the Windows-like look and feel. First off, its not a cop-out and secondly, it does look like Windows. Where is the multiple-workspaces? Isn’t that a big plus, I had to add them and enable the panel object. What about this “control center”, feels a lot like Windows “control panel” to me. There is much more I think, and it also might be somewhat because I’m a GNOME user. But like I said, if I wanted it to look like Windows, I would just run Windows.

Ani also pointed out that some of my complaints about the lack of horizontal bars were because of the wasted space, especially with the new widescreen displays coming out. In retrospect, I agree that its useful to only have one bar on widescreen displays or because it takes up so much space. The “one glance” aspect I get from my status bars sure helps me, however, so I’ll define this as just a preference.

benji.weber@gmail.com pointed out his installation time was much shorter than mine. I’m not sure how he got this, but I installed from DVD offline so maybe its a bit related. He also mentioned that there are many more users testing KDE over GNOME. I suppose this might be the case for openSUSE, but overall, I think that number is pretty evenly split between the two major desktops.

Thank you all for your wonderful comments, I really appreciate the contrasting views and look forward to the next round of comments.

As I didn’t use openSUSE as much yesterday and today, so I have a little less to report:

GOOD

• YaST is growing on me, but I’m still adjusting to living in this world. Its still not my favorite tool (0)
• Suspend works like a charm. Although this also works in Fedora. (+1)

Positive Score: +1

BAD

• The YaST printer tool does not deliver reliable results when setting up printers. YaST discovered my printer, but failed to deliver the correct IP address (-1)
• My bluetooth mouse is still not working, even after following several good tutorials I found online. As per this tutorial from Andrew Jorgensen, I already have the bluez-gnome and bluez-utils from the GNOME Community repository installed. Not sure why, but it looks this one will have to wait for an update, whenever that occurs. (0)
• Enabling the fingerprint reader only asks me for files. I thought that was odd, clicking on the help indicates that providing files from another installation that uses the fingerprint reader will set it up. I didn’t see a way to set this up from scratch with openSUSE in YaST, however. (-1)

Negative Score: -2

Total Score for the last two days: -1 (not bad for day two, you never know, I might actually give a positive score by the end…)

Overall score: -6

PREFERENCES

• I still prefer the system-config-* tools from Fedora over YaST. I don’t like its interface and it still seems to be unfriendly. I do think that its much improved over the original YaST I used back in SUSE 10.0

What’s wrong with SUSE you ask? Just about EVERYTHING! I’m not comfortable at all in this rancid environment. It sucks the life right out of you. I hope some SUSE people come running to save me from this turmoil I feel as I currently hate using this distro. Here’s my first impressions: (beware, the list is rather long)

GOOD

The items below are positives and the openSUSE team deserves credit for all of their hard work in these areas.

• Wireless works (+1)
  • My Intel wireless card from my T60p is recognized and associates with my access points
• The nautilus-open-terminal package is enabled by default (+2)
  • This is the right-click on desktop –> Terminal option, (something severely lacking in fedora and not easily installed in a kickstart)
  • Having this feature, its very simple to get started with the terminal which is definitely needed for the power user in me
• Install allowed me to choose not to use their grub (0) [while this is nice, if I had installed their grub, it would have wiped out my fedora grub components]
• zypper is much improved over the previous rug (10.1) tool (+1)
  • still needs work though
  • easy to add repos compared with fedora
    • packagekit can solve much of the incontinuity in fedora
    • though its nice to have a simple gui to add repos, knowing which repos is still a bit of an exercise in futility.

Positive Score: +4

BAD

Whle there is some good in openSUSE, its apparent to me that there is much to be improved.  As noted below, many more things are in need of improvement, to put it nicely.

• The install takes much longer than necessary (-3)
  • Still uses ugly YAST text user interface
    • YAST didn’t recognize my video driver, but could have just used the VESA driver for the gui install
  • Asks too many questions about details that could easily be simpler
  • Did not work well with other OSes (GRUB)
    • YAST installer wanted to overwrite my fedora GRUB configuration, shouldn’t Linux play well with each other in this sense?
• One-click install is more like 10-click (-1)
  • From opensuse.org, you can do what is called a “one-click install”, and about 8-10 clicks later its installed. If its one-click, its should be one (maybe two) clicks total.
• The initial GNOME config of openSUSE is too Windows-like (-1)
  • If I wanted my Linux desktop to look like Windows, I’d use KDE (or even run Windows)
  • It has only one bar, and at the bottom, not enough room for status apps
  • I had to add workspaces as only one was provided by default, that seems limiting
• bluez-gnome doesn’t have hidd or any sort of recognition for my bluetooth mouse (or anyone’s bluetooth mouse, for that matter) (-2)
  • dbus fails to recognize bluetooth mouse
  • There’s even a bug on it blaming others, yet it works in Fedora – https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=330461
• The bash prompt is ugly - (0)
  • This one is a personal preference, but its hard to tell when I am the root user and when I am not. As such, I will modify my .bashrc and fix the PS1 value
• The wireless driver for my T60p is not the new iwl3945, but the ipw3945 proprietary from intel – (-1)
  • The open driver has been out for quite some time
• Proprietary codecs were not easy to find, nor install (0)
  • Fedora doesn’t make this simple either really.  Yet, when I found them in Fedora they worked first try, gstreamer failed miserably several times in openSUSE
  • an attempt at a codec buddy like tool was made, but doesn’t work…
• zypper does not inform you of the dependencies needed to install even though it reports how much it will download (-1)
  • I want to know what packages I’ll be installing before I install them

Negative Score: -9

Total score for day 1:  -5 OOPS – that’s not good!

To be honest, I think I’m being very generous in some of the points I’m giving.  OpenSUSE makes it very difficult for my lifestyle so far.  I’m not sure what they can do with 10.3 to make it better, but I’d like to hear comments and suggestions on ways to help.

I’m sure hoping that day two will be better.  I’m already starting my list and will be testing such things as; video, development, lvm, raid, kvm/xen virtualization and much, much more.  As I continue to suffer through this bluetoothless mouse world openSUSE has created for me.

Cheers until tomorrow,

Herlo