Submitted by Most reviews – so far – of openSUSE 11.0 have been quite positive, but that doesn’t automatically mean everybody is happy. TechReview offers some criticism of the latest offering from openSUSE. “openSUSE 11.0 is a difficult system to qualify. Highlights include good availability of current packages and YAST GUI configuration tools for some advanced features. However, these advantages are largely eclipsed by a chaotic, dysfunctional package management system and marginal performance. New Linux users with more complex network configurations or challenging hardware may be forced to use openSUSE due to its unique innovations in GUI system configuration. Yet, experienced and inexperienced users alike may find themselves increasingly frustrated by the grave lack of refinement in what is an otherwise capable Linux distribution.”
I hear the same story for all OpenSUSE releases:
A rich desktop with a comprehensive GUI configuration tool called YaST that suffers from suboptimal performance and terrible package management.
Honestly, I have never understood the love-fest around YAST. It is hands down my least favorite distro-specific config tool
IMO nothing beats Yast in functionality and usability. I never use other distros (exclude Mandriva) because they lack a tool comparable to Yast. But I agree with the reviewer, and I was posting similar comments on news.opensuse.org. They need to focus on the quality and usablity for end user. They made some retarded decisions like SLAB menu but defend them vigourously. They have to understand that computer newbies and illiterates are not their userbase. Starting with 10.1, the quality is going downhill because of minor quibbles which can be easily rectified. I installed it on my Professor’s machine and he calls it Linux Windows because very easy and convenient to use but too many annoyances.
Edited 2008-07-01 16:13 UTC
yeah, you’re right. both performance and package management always have sucked in suse. It’s the premier thing (K)Ubuntu does better – in practically everything else suse shines.
Not in the latest version — in openSUSE 11.0 package management literally rocks. It’s way more powerful and intelligent than APT, and is quicker since we’ve switched to LZMA rpm payload.
Well, I’ll surely check out suse as soon as I’ve got my EEEPC (or clone thereof)… See how it is these days.
Well, not according to the review. I haven’t tried it yet so I won’t say one way or the other, but if it really has no way of removing dead dependencies, I don’t know how you can possibly think it is better than apt. Also, even if it could stand a comparison, if your mp3 packages have OpenOffice dependencies it won’t do any good.
The thing about apt is that it keeps a log (in my simplistic way of understanding it) of which packages were automatically installed to satisfy dependencies for package A. Thenceforth, it recommends that you remove them if package A is no longer installed. This is not the same as finding “orphan” packages. For example, b43-fwcutter would be listed as an orphan package because as far as I know nothing depends on it. Yet, it may still be needed. Yet, apt would not recommend that it be autoremoved, because it was not automatically installed, but rather explicitly installed.
I’ve been a openSUSE user on my desktop for some years now, and I think 11.0 has the best package ever in a suse release.
As for the article, it seems that the review was only focused on the gnome-side, and most problems he has with Yast are bugs in the gtk2 interface, and are not present in the qt/qt4 version.
I chose suse originally for their configuration tools, and still do, if you have a problem with the newer/more immature gtk version of yast, please do try the qt version and don’t judge yast by it’s cover
While I’ve been Red Hat user, version x.0 was the worst and versions x.2 and x.3 were great. The same thing goes for SUSE, it seems. I’ll wait for 11.2.
DG
It’s always the same: long startup time, Yast is extremely slow, updating process takes a lot of resources, compiz desktop special effects don’t work …
And the new KDE4 crashes a LOT.
It would’ve been nice if you raised some actually valid criticisms. openSUSE has one of the fastest ever start-up times (see the sneak peeks article on this), YaST and package management (including the new updater) are incredibly fast (almost instant) and it’s also less intensive than its competitors (yum, smart) — again, see the sneak peeks article.
If you have any valuable criticism to raise, please do; but don’t just mention completely unsubstantiated troll remarks.
shrug, no suse never enjoyed fast boot. I know, I was using suse for pretty long time. You can cut down all services, compile custom kernel, clean DE. Still suse is slow.
same goes with package management which is for unknown reason simply bad always coping with bizarre dependencies.
If you compare different versions of suse, you may notice changes, some for better some for worse. However when comparing suse boot time or package management to other distros it is evident that suse falls somewhere in the middle of the pack.
The article criticisms are valid, it is really difficult to find a place where suse will shine.
I won’t argue about boot times etc., since openSUSE doesn’t pretend to be a lightweight distro.
But complaining about package management in 11.0 is just wrong. The performance is outstanding, the needless repo refreshes in Yast PM are a thing of the past, and the new satsolver dependency handler doesn’t have the old dependency quirks.
Combined with the ever-increasing array of packages in the build-service, package handling on openSUSE is now a jewel rather then a sore point.
I think it’s a milestone improvement that the comparisons with apt-deb have been reduced from performance and package availability, to the fact that it doesn’t easily remove orphaned libraries.
A review like this should have been posted one or two years ago. Software management is getting easier, the speed gets better and the one-click-install feature is just brilliant.
And SuSE has always been a KDE distribution of course. Not to say GNOME doesn’t work, but the focus has always been KDE.
I tried openSuSE longer time ago and I was impressed that the language support of Gnome was better than the one of KDE. Something similar is mentioned in the article, too:
“Like several other Linux distributions, openSUSE 11.0 has language packs that switch the language of the main interface and many of the user programs to a regional language. Even better, the language can be selected by any user from the GDM login screen. “
Nothing very new, but very useful.
“As for keyboard support, keyboard layouts can be configured from YAST. […] Most notably, the Ctrl+Shift shortcut is available and functional. Interestingly, Gnome is currently the only desktop I have used that allows me to easily configure keymaps and shortcuts.”
Something I usually did via xorg.conf and ~/.xmodmaprc.
It’s worth mentioning that the quality of language translation – at least from my very individual point, remember this! – of Gnome has gotten better and better, while I cannot say this about KDE, sadly. Of course, this doesn’t matter to me because I prefer the native english language due to its higher quality than the (mostly) sloppy german translations, but that’s what is important for german users: They are scared of english error messages they do not understand, and when they select “Deutsch” once, they want everything to be in german, every application, every message. But language selection is, as far as I know, specific to either Gnome or KDE, so applications from the other desktop environment or applications from outside of both surely won’t be affected at all, at least – if it’s possible – you manually set some environmental variables (I think it’s LANG in Linux; in BSD, it’s the LC_* variable set) and be sure they are not overwritten or ignored.
I will surely play around some time with openSuSE 11.0, but I think my system is too old for this…
I have been using Suse since 6.0, and as my title states, 8.3 was the best for me interms of updates and hardware recognition.
I used that distro all the way until 10.3 came out. I have been a bit disappointed with it and all the ohter releases since then and will not be investing time in OpenSuse until they have a release where KDE4 is of feature parity with KDE 3.5 in 10.3.
I agree with the article wrt Broadcom. I have a Broadcom wireless card and constantly have to use fwcutter and whatnot to get the thing running when I try new distros. This is a well known issue with all distros, and you would think they would have a better way of dealiing with this for less expeerienced users!
The update system has also gone downhill since 8.3. It used to be so fast and I had no problems. Now it is buggy and freezes fairly regularly. I end up having to compile and do stuff manually on my own. Thank goodness the distro is still rock stable once I have built my packages and I only use about 6 apps regularly.
I really hope they can fix the hardware issues, the update manager and that KDE4 advances significantly soon. Others are starting to catch up, including *buntu…and I am starting to lose my fait in my favorite distribution…
If you know they’re such a problem – why do you keep purchasing machines with broadcom wireless cards? its a well known fact that they hate opensource and refuse to work with third parties.
I can’t work out, therefore, when end users complain about hardware support and the problem lies with the fact that they deliberately go out of their way to purchase hardware that is not only pathetic in quality and reliability (which Broadcom devices are) but they are problematic, even for Windows users too!
I’ll say it once and I’ll sait again, NEVER purchase hardware with a Broadcom device in it. Maybe with a sizable number refusing to purchase their devices, be they windows or opensource, Broadcom will actually make sure their products aren’t pathetically unreliable and provide specifications to driver writers when they need it.
Edited 2008-07-02 02:51 UTC
QFT. I wrestled with Broadcom in my last two laptops, having to do things like custom compile wireless-dev kernels or apply patches to vanilla.
I must admit that I made sure my current laptop had intel wireless, and it is a breath of fresh air to have it working out of the box.
Our wallets are the only vote we have as users…
Atheros and Intel are two of the best wireless chipsets out there. I’ve got an Intel 4965 in my Thinkpad (running Solaris) and it is 100% perfectly reliable. I can use it anywhere in the house and pick up a single rated ‘excellent’ and download via the internet at around 500KBs.
It is the freemarket, the company will supply what is demanded. Unless we as users start demanding something and demonstrating that demand through how we spend out dollars – we aren’t going to be taken seriously. That is why it pisses me off something stupid when I hear people whine about Broadcom wireless cards when it is their very action of purchasing a Broadcom wireless card that encourages Broadcom never to co-operate with the opensource community.
Oh, and as said, I hang out at a number of forums, and I can tell you, 9/10, when a wireless network problem is raised – its related to Broadcom devices. At the end of the day, even without the opensourcre rhetoric – Broadcom just doesn’t make good products. When a vendors products are garbage, it is best to avoid purchasing them
I prefer atheros,prism, or when both two aren’t available intel. Much easier to conduct site surveys with the first two mentioned chipsets. Broadcom is just a pain in the ass with *nix and air* and kis*.
Have you actually tried installing your Broadcom card in SUSE 11? or Ubuntu 8.04? It is a very simple procedure these days. I don’t know what the graphical method is, however from the command line you just need to run a single command as root – it downloads and installs the firmware which is necessary for the new opensource ‘b43’ driver to work. I am sure there must be a graphical option for the same. The only downside is that they are not allowed to include the firmware on the disk, so you need an Internet connection for it to work (this is the same for both SUSE and Ubuntu – probably every other distro too).
My broadcom is an especially tricky. I have never managed to get it to work with the opensource drivers or 64-bit NDIS. The new driver is a breeze.
Except for a couple of minor annoyances, which were solved either by myself or by a bug fix and for a major one (more about that in a moment), I find that openSUSE 11.0 is nothing but a major improvement over previous releases. True, some of the improvements, especially in the DVD installer, are very new and need further testing.
As to the review, I am sorry, but it sounds to me like a long, biased rant.
“I have a slow, unreliable internet connection, a 4+ GB DVD is simply not feasible. So I opted for the Gnome Live CD. However, in my case there is another variable^aEUR” I frequently install Linux on old computers, for which I generally have to carefully choose the installed packages to achieve decent performance. As with most live CD installers, the openSUSE installer does not permit customization of the package selection.”
Sorry, but whose fault is it if you have a slow connection and if you install on old computers? Then maybe openSUSE is not the right distro for you. I have a powerful computer and a fast internet connection and I didn’t come across the same problems. The DVD installer offers plenty of possible different combinations. In any case there are many ways you can get a DVD: a friend, a magazine, a shop…
“The YAST tool at first glance offers an impressive array of system configuration options. But upon further investigation, it appears difficult to reconcile YAST with manual changes to configuration files. In many cases, YAST partially duplicates the functionality of other GUI tools from third parties, some of which are superior to those found in YAST. openSUSE also adds an additional layer of complexity to an already complex system in the form of /etc/sysconfig. This layer, which is configurable via YAST, is similar to a system registry and appears to do abstraction of some advanced settings that would normally be configurable via other config files. While attempting to be automated and user friendly, openSUSE feels even more complex and inexplicable than the the typical disparate hodgepodge that is found in any modern Linux distribution.”
This is only your personal opinion, sir.
If you find YaST too complex, then clearly openSUSE is not for you. I like in equal manner Debian and openSUSE, of course for very different reasons. Heck, I even like Slackware, bu that is not a good reason to diss openSUSE.
Next, package management. I didn’t experience all the problems he did. I use only YaST or CLI Zypper. With the latter you don’t need to refresh every time.
For a review see here:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080602#feature
“Another command that I missed on openSUSE is apt-get autoremove, which removes leftover dependencies for a package that has since been removed.”
Sorry sir, that is not available in RPM distributions.
Now my take. SUSE/openSUSE have had the following issues:
1)Package management. That has been greatly improved in 11.0.
I don’t feel the need any longer for third part package managers like apt4rpm or Smart.
2)OpenSUSE has been accused of being slow. 11.0 is a clear improvement.
3)Sax2. Yes, that is a pain. I have a laptop and a desktop with NVIDIA cards, I can’t get my favourite resolution in either. I had for some time an ATI in my desktop, I couldn’t use openSUSE, while Kanotix worked fine.
I’ll start a campaign for rewriting Sax2.
Edited 2008-07-01 17:13 UTC
Edit: I have noticed that YaST package management interfaces depend on whether you use KDE or GNOME. He is right, the Gnome one is really ugly. My apologies.
I agree with the SAX2 comment. I had to configure my external monitor with my laptop manually when SAX wouldn’t recognize the changes I made in Xinerama.
I am glad you had otherwise good experience iwth OpenSuse though..
But why? Installation of dependencies should be traceable on RPM based systems just as on DEB based ones. You just need to implement it, as on Debian aptitude and later apt-get did.
BTW, I also cannot see any technical reason why SuSE’s package management has to suck. Why is there no “zypper dist-upgrade” or another option which easily performs a global upgrade of everything to the newest version? Every distro has it.
And why does SuSE’s dependency solver always have to be the same nightmare? I also started using SuSE with 6.0, and later switched to Debian potato. I am now on Debian Lenny, eight years later or so.
I tried SuSE 10.3 and 11.0 out of curiosity. But as long as Yast’s conflict solver remains as horrible as it is today (and was nine years ago), nothing will make me switch back!
Guys look at aptitude to see how a really smart dependency solver works. I cannot see why SuSE cannot have anything similar. After all, it is free software, the algorithms are there for everyone to study.
Usually is enough to issue (if there are any dependencies):
( echo “package”; rpm -q –whatrequires “package” ) | xargs -r rpm -el
if you want to stay on rpm only. But, of course you can use the more sane and sensible approach:
yum remove “package”.
If you install yum, of course.
Edited 2008-07-01 22:34 UTC
there is actually “zypper dup” which updates everything. No trolling please
Well, it doesn’t. In fact, it was completely replaced in 11.0. What conflicts have you run into, or are you basing that on the 10.3 version?
Whilst I would call the new dependency solver good, it is nowhere near the best in terms of end user experience. It still gets tripped up when I choose certain packages in the wrong order (change the order I select the packages and magically there is no conflict).
Deb based distros provide better results at a package level, but AFAIK the suse solver needs to work with rpms which is file based dependency (a lot harder to get right).
I would say suse has the best rpm based package management system hands down, but in terms of ease of use it is still too complicated (reflects deb complexity vs rpm complexity).
There’s no intrinsic difference between dependencies in .rpm and .deb. You can have real, virtual and file dependencies in both: just depend on a package’s actual name, have packages with explicit Provides, or depend on a file. The way dependencies are actually done is entirely an implementation detail down to the distribution, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the packaging format used.
For instance, in Mandriva, the use of file-based dependencies is entirely deprecated and considered a packaging error. I don’t know how SUSE handles things, but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t rely on file dependencies much.
RPM intrinsically relies on file-based dependencies. It’s the key differentiator from DEB. openSUSE follows the RPM standard, as do the other RPM-based distros (though Mandriva has it’s own flavor of RPM).
The benefit is that you can theoretically package a KDE app (for instance) in an rpm, and it should resolve in Fedora or openSUSE, despite the fact that the KDE libraries are packaged as kde3libs or kdelibs3 depending on the distro, as long as the library version levels meet the dependency requirements.
The drawback has historically been performance, since there is much more meta data for the dependency solver to deal with, but as has been addressed in the posts above, openSUSE (and Red Hat) have made significant strides in that area.
“Why is there no “zypper dist-upgrade” or another option which easily performs a global upgrade of everything to the newest version? Every distro has it.”
Yes, “zypper dist-upgrade” or “zypper dup”, it is what I do daily. You can also upgrade everything from the YaST package manager: Package Groups-> all packages: right click in the list of packages-> All in This List-> Update if newer version available (not terribly intuitive, I know, but it allows partial upgrades, something that in Debian you must do manually).
“And why does SuSE’s dependency solver always have to be the same nightmare?”
I don’t think so, not any longer: “zypper verify”, “zypper ve”.
I am not sure but guessing, but your problem may be solved if you go for LCD in screen resolution settings. Sax2 always worked for me and I love it.
I have witnessed not really any problem with OpenSuSE 11 except sax2 didnt start. Which was easy to solve, by adding NoPowerConnectorCheck to xorgconfig and simply leave sax2 at ease. And thereafter i had 3D support for my nvidia graphics card.
“^aEURoeA^aEUR grade in this category is the fact that by default it allows root logins. This option, although convenient, opens up a gaping security hole for the most dangerous user^aEUR” the system owner”
You can via Yast select paranoid mode under local security policy. Thus any logged in non-root user cannot su to root. You have to ctrl+f1.. and login directly as root from a terminal.
How will you administer your box if you don’t have root access.
By the way isn’t root most of the times the owner?
Posting completely personally, not professionally (as most people here know by now, I work for Mandriva).
My personal bugbear with SUSE has always been one that’s alluded to in this review. Years ago, way before I joined MDV, I ran SUSE (7.3 or something) on my old laptop for a while, as Mandrake (as was) couldn’t install to it for some hardware reason (odd CD drive). The thing that drove me up the wall was the way YaST handles configuration files. It seems like a large set of config files are basically ‘owned’ by YaST and the settings you set *in YaST*. Every time you change any tiny thing with YaST, every one of these config files is re-written (from scratch) using the values set in YaST.
So it’s incredibly tough to edit these files manually, if you should want to. Say I change something trivial in xorg.conf because I just find it easier that way than doing it in a GUI tool. Then I happen to go into YaST and change something completely unrelated – a network setting. Result? xorg.conf gets rewritten without my manual change! Man, that just used to drive me round the bend.
Every so often I install SUSE in a VM just to keep up with developments. AFAICT, this behaviour is still the same. There may well be a way to avoid it that I don’t know about, but it sure annoyed / annoys me.
“Say I change something trivial in xorg.conf because I just find it easier that way than doing it in a GUI tool. Then I happen to go into YaST and change something completely unrelated – a network setting. Result? xorg.conf gets rewritten without my manual change!”
I believe that has changed, because since 10.3 I have used a custom xorg.conf and it has never been overwritten by YaST.
Well, xorg.conf was just an example – the first that came to me off the top of my head. I’m not actually sure it’s affected by this issue, I think it’s handled by something called SAX rather than YaST, isn’t it? But still, it’s possible they fixed it and I’m just misreading the reference in this review. I hope so
… subpixel hinting is not enabled by default.
anyways here you can find instructions to go around it:
http://www.andreavaccaro.org/Enabling_SubPixel_Hinting_in_openSUSE_…
I’ve installed OpenSuSE 11.0 on two machines in the past week.
First, I installed OpenSuSE 11.0 Xfce to replace Xubuntu on my old P3 1 ghz laptop. Yes, the SuSE installer is more complicated but then a lot more stuff is offered than on Xubuntu. The network configurator had problems with a static IP – the setting wouldn’t stick – but apart from that things were fine. The result is a fully featured Xfce desktop that strikes me as much more attractive than Xubuntu’s and with a better range of packages. Speed and memory usage are fine too, in stark contrast to the last two iterations of SuSE which were well nigh unusable on this machine.
Second, I installed OpenSuSE 11.0 to replace Debian Testing on a core duo desktop. Here, I’m afraid that some of the Techreview’s criticisms do begin to bite. I too find the SLAB menu a step backwards. Nvidia’s 3D drivers took some reinstalls before they “took” and why oh why are those with widescreen monitors stuck at 1200 x 1000 on the Vesa stuff out of the box? This is 2008. I tried KDE4 but it was pretty unusable and I ended up with massive file corruptions. Imho, OpenSuSE should not have included something this crude on a flagship distribution.
So I wiped and reinstalled with Gnome and some KDE 3.5. Gnome seems fine, but I experience lock-ups and crashes when 3D effects (compiz and co) are enabled. Banshee plays one track then crashes. Hibernate works but sleep only works manually, after some tweaking, whereas both worked with creamy smoothness on Debian Testing.
I haven’t had a problem with multimedia on either install, but then I am an old SuSE hand and had checked the OpenSuSE wiki first anyway for multimedia tips with 11.0. Enable Packman, select a list of packages noted down in advance, and away we go.
I don’t think OpenSuSE’s package management is nearly as poor as Techreview paints it. So far, I’ve found it to be OK and reasonably fast though a long way from Debian’s aptitude. The last two iterations of SuSE contained package managers so bad that I didn’t use either distro for more than a few days. Small mercies with 11.0, then.
So I am a happy bunny. This strikes me as the best SuSE since the Novell takeover. However, there are certainly rough edges that would make installing SuSE unnecessarily complex if you are new to Linux. As for YaST, it is the entire point of SuSE. If you don’t like YaST, don’t use SuSE. I don’t think it’s perfect but it’s certainly very good, perhaps a godsend for new users, and much better than it used to be.
And I’m still unsure where OpenSuSE is really going. I don’t buy the community line with commercially owned distros. Either a distro is commercially owned or it is independent. To me, Debian is a community distro and OpenSuSE is not. I don’t think there is any such thing as a halfway house. Calling the shots, the legal ownership, the marketing stuff, who is ultimately in charge – it all goes one way. It’s clear that Novell has put a great deal of effort and investment into SuSE, but who is it for? Who are they aiming at? And why so many rough edges?
I think this takes us back to another thread. When too many commercially-minded marketing folks get involved, “ready for release” starts to replace ready for prime time, and then the shenanigans start.
I’m not sure why this is but it seems most reviews that paint OpenSUSE 11 in a negative light are ALL running GNOME. I’m not going to draw any conclusions from this other than perhaps they are comparing to Ubuntu or some other distro that focuses ONLY on Gnome.
I also agree KDE4 is still not very stable in openSUSE 11 although I have tried the 4.1 beta 2 build and it shows a huge improvement in all areas.
I quickly reverted my desktop from the default KDE4 back to KDE 3.5.9 and from that perspective OpenSUSE 11 is by far the best openSUSE ever and has become my #1 Linux distro. It simply rocks. The only thing I found to be lacking in 10.3 was package management and now that 11.0 has fixed this right up its just an awesome distro. Maybe this reviewer was a bit too picky…thats certainly my thoughts on it…
Exactly, KDE 3.5.9 is the DE to use in 11.0, or maybe Xfce.
As I have already said, for some odd reason the package management interface is different in Gnome (and quite poor, IMO).