(K)Ubuntu vs openSUSE
I’ve installed Kubuntu on my laptop recently and I must say I am pretty impressed. It has picked up most of m laptops hardware and the hibernation and media button functions I could never get working on openSUSE worked out of the box! Pretty cool! I have no doubt I could have got them working with openSUSE but I wasn’t willing to spend the time on it.
Anyway installing software is pretty easy with their YaST like APT-get. The only disadvantage I can see compared to openSUSE is that there is no YaST equivalent to allow you to edit system configuration options such as starting or configuring a SAMBA server or such.
Anyway I haven’t had much time to play with it as I still have no broadband connection (sigh) but I was sufficiently impressed to load it on my girlfriends computer (my girlfriend being a novice in computers in general) and she seems to be managing quite well. She likes it much more than the travesty that is Vista anyway which kept crashing on her pretty new laptop (Thank you Microsoft).
For example when she started amaroK it asked her did she want to play MP3s so she clicked yes and it went away and downloaded and installed the required files. I shudder to think what she would have got up to if trying to install MP3 support in openSUSE.
Anyway it’s looking pretty good and between that and the always user friendly KDE (Thank you for KNetwork Manager!) she is flying it.
I am still using openSUSE at work though as I often have to set up different Servers and Services and YaST just can’t be beaten for ease of use that way. Also the server this site runs on is SuSE. And SUSE seems to have more packages available and is more configurable.
But from a home user point of view where you just want to watch DVDs and play music and sure the ‘net I am beginning to lean towards KUbuntu.
But we’ll see…….
Oh yeah and I got another article published on Novell. :)
If you think YAST is easy…you haven’t tried Mandriva’s Control Center. It’s even better than this.
I find Mandriva is often forgotten about in the realm of Business Linux…and for a Mandriva type experience without the business flare and more focus on the home user…you can’t beat PCLinuxOS…because it has the PCLinuxOS Control Center.
Both PCLinuxOS Control Center and Mandriva Control Center have no equals in Linux.
I found the package manager in OpenSUSE very good. Not sure what more you can ask for a package manager. The Package manager in Ubuntu seemed just as good, but I can’t see what all the fuss was about with it, as so many people had written about how superior it is compared to YAST. Looks the same to me, although I’m about to switch back to ubuntu just for a change as soon as my distro downloads, as YAST package manager seems to have corrupted. Hopefully (having nvidia graphics) I won’t be faced with a command promp like some of the other distros I won’t name and shame. Got to say that both OpenSUSE and Ubuntu seem great for hardware detection.
One thing I can’t forgive though (and hope to find a resolution for) is the lack of a drive list that tells you how much space you have left. It’s a bit of a disgrace when distros don’t have this as an out-of-the-box options, as this is fundamental to managing your drive space!
In terms of mulimedia editing Ubuntu Studio is incredible having the realtime kernel. Not being able to find the drive space list though, I went back to suse and installed a realtime kernel. What a pain to get working. Oh, and it seems that Jahshaka RPM’s are only available for Ubuntu, and compiling software in Opensuse rarely works as perl never seems to fully install, even when you install all but the kitchen sink! Hopefully Ubuntu will be better.
Either way, I’m in heaven to be away from Win$ once and for all. A big warm thank you to the linux community for setting me free! :-)