Submitted by We’re in the middle of the distribution release frenxy, or so it seems. After Ubuntu 9.10 and Mandriva Linux 2010.0, it’s OpenSUSE time now: the team has pushed out OpenSUSE 11.2. A minor version number, but there’s enough in there, still.
OpenSUSE 11.2 uses the 2.6.31 version of the Linux kernel, and also comes with a kernel specificallytweaked for desktop use. The new default file system is Ext4, but Ext3 is still supported if you’re still wary of the new kid in town. For the adventurous, the YaST partitioner can work with Btrfs, too. Work has also gone into better supporting netbooks, hardware-wise.
Desktop-wise, it comes with the usual suspects: KDE 4.3 and GNOME 2.28. There’s also the new KDE Firefox and OpenOffice.org integration, hopefully leading to a more consistent KDE desktop experience. As a sidenote: can anyone confirm if the KDE integration for these applications goes beyond a mere theme? As in, if I switch my theme in KDE, will OpenOffice.org and Firefox adapt? In the past, “integration” often meant nothing more than slapping a theme on these applications which did not change when you changed your KDE theme. GNOME has been given a new theme, called Sonar.
Go grab it from the download page!
I do like the new theme, but i’m still not a fan of the default menu.
Just tried to download the DVD for PPC, only to discover -after googling- that PPC support is dropped.
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2009-08/msg00498.html
I would expect from such a company like Novell, to at least have the decency to SAY that they drop support for an architecture. Regardless if it’s popular or not.
Back to Debian then I guess.
The ironic thing is that the “Get it” image on the main page still shows a CD labelled “PPC.”
Correction: Novell is not making a release of openSUSE Factory as 11.2.
However, openSUSE continues to be built for PPC, so you can use openSUSE Factory as a rolling release.
If PPC users want, they could step up and make a PPC 11.2 release with CDs as part of the the openSUSE project, as the ARM guys are doing.
See this thread http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-ppc/2009-11/msg00001.html .
As in, if I switch my theme in KDE, will OpenOffice.org and Firefox adapt? In the past, “integration” often meant nothing more than slapping a theme on these applications which did not change when yuo changed your KDE theme. GNOME has been given a new theme, called Sonar.
If the new OpenOffice.org integration is the same thing that was introduced by Kubuntu developers back in July, then I can vouch for the theme changing with KDE. I think it is:
setenv OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP kde
to get it working.
Although this is a non-issue if you are running QtCurve, which is developed simultaneously for both GTK and Qt, and IMO looks a lot nicer than Oxygen.
For me, and this is a matter of taste; Oxygen looks professional and current while Qtcurve looks like a 90’s thing. I reckon, nonetheless, that while the icons are superb there’s still room for improvement on windows decorations (I’m anxiously waiting for 4.4 changes)
The thing with QtCurve though, is that it can be modified to look like many other popular desktop themes. It does a good job looking like any of the Clearlooks/Murrine themes from Gnome, Polyester from KDE, etc. I know it’s pushing five years since Clearlooks made its debut with animated progressbars and the like, and if that’s dated then so be it, but to me, Oxygen is very bland and uninspiring. Plus, I prefer the consistent look across Qt/Gtk apps that QtCurve provides rather than having to wait for users at gnome-look to update their Gtk Oxygen theme with every minor KDE release.
Edited 2009-11-16 00:49 UTC
I’m currently grabbing it at 6.7 MB/Sec with some peaks at 9.5MB/Second. Nice.
It works. I’m using integrated versions for some months now and thank god they were done. No more GTK file dialogs or gnome’s preferred applications running
now KDE just needs a truly decent and full-featured Qt4 browser.
Have you tried Arora? It’s a great webkit alternative to Konqueror. Runs circles around good ol’konq.
I’m used to my FF plugins and I can say that I don’t use too much of them, just 4 or 5. Arora is still too simple for my taste.
I’ve high hopes in both Arora and rekonq, but they still need to mature (I got issues with both, with rekonq is a cookies bug). I’d like that those projects took a risk and introduce innovations on the interface.
Edited 2009-11-14 16:32 UTC
http://www.seoexpertconsultants.com/index.php?linux&release=openSUS…
The default KDE theme is so pale and low contrast it actually looks as though the monitor is broken. The low-contrast idea seems to affect the whole of KDE; the app installer shows pale featureless grey blobs that seem to be application icons, and the explanations are given in a pale gray font on a white background; file browser tabs are pale, with a pale blue outline; icons are pale and featureless.
In short, I hated its look; I hoped Suse would be better than Kubuntu, but except for the wallpaper color, that is now green, the rest looks exactly the same. Alternative themes are so similar, (except for the dark ones, those DO have dark colours) that they make almost no difference.
As for the usability, I rate it down low. I hated the default menu, with panels that shift in and out of existence, and a hodgepodge of setup options smattered or repeated in unrelated menus. Discoverability of features is low; most things might be only four clicks away, but the whole universe and its parallels might lay thus far, for all the confusion that lies the way. And the way KDE forces its kool-talk lingo unto users is extremely irritating — “Plasma Desktop Options”, “Akonadi Settings”, “Sticky notes Plasmoid”, “Nepomuk has crashed”…
And SUSE not only would not install a proprietary nVidia driver, which for some frames of mind might be OK, but refused to believe that resolutions over 800×600 were possible using the free driver. Yeah, running sax2 from a console as a superuser let me reconfigure, but that is not exactly what usability is about.
I DO want to like KDE, and I am really giving it a try, but each time I boot I feel my heart shrink. It really has a VERY LONG way to go. Every 4.x version is expected to be the real one… maybe 4.4 witll be it?
I don’t use KDE. But from what I’ve heard from others, the KDE problems in OpenSuse are all Novell’s fault. Probably due to their shady relationship with Microsoft. And Fedora’s poor KDE integration is because… well… everybody knows that RedHat doesn’t care about the desktop. And it’s well known that Canonical has a secret plan to destroy KDE. So that explains Kubuntu. Debian is not much into custom integration, so the poor KDE integration there is due to that. And… I mean… what would anyone expect from Mandriva? Enough said.
If it weren’t for all those unfortunate plots and conspiracies, KDE4 would have killed off Windows and all the other Linux DE’s long ago.
It’s really a dirty shame, isn’t it?
Would you like to do a keynote at next year’s Akademy? I haven’t laughed so much in ages.
How has the Novell-Microsoft deal affected the FOSS community so far? I still have yet to see evidence of FOSS coming under danger from manipulation by that “Giant Evil” Corporation.
Thankfully, KDE4 is excellent on Gentoo. With the monthly bugfix releases, it almost finishes compiling before the next one comes out!
It’s a shame however that this stresses the CPU a bit and the flash videos of people falling out of burning buildings end up choppy, but I consider that a reasonable price to pay for such an experience.
and this is based on? As far as I know, a lot of KDE devs use Opensuse and there’s plenty of feedback from downstream to upstream . (Correct me if wrong.)
I must agree on the default KDE theme Oxygen. It’s not on par with many Gnome themes. The blue shadow (or is it glow?) that windows cast is the top of the ice-cream..
Curious enough I cannot find a single GNOME theme that I both like, is not intrusive (like black, no contrast with fonts) and that lacks glitches. Matter of taste, I guess.
Looking at random screenshots of OpenSuse 11.2 on google, I don’t really see how you can call it low contrast. e.g first hit:
http://files.opensuse.org/opensuse/en/e/e0/A3-kde4.png
That has far more contrast than Windows 7, for example.
With the default panel, what exactly are you having trouble with doing? Which applications do you feel are in the wrong place?
I really can’t see why people can’t use the new menu. You just type the name of the app, and there it is. Far faster than navigating layers of menus.
First: Notice that the colorful icons are not KDE’s. Look at KDE’s icons in the same screenshot (Dolphin, Kontact, Applications, Computer, even OpenOffice, as well as everything inside Konqueror’s MyComputer view). Look at the pale gray entry titles in My Computer, the seamlessness between window title, menu and toolbar, the window control buttons. The status bar does not look like that by default: it shares the pale gray theme.
Believe me, if you scratch further, you will get treated to yet more of the same. The application installer is an example.
I’m not using it right now, so I cannot recall exactly, but I found the panel dreadfully organized, and did not find the shifting panels that may turn into full-fledged windows with more shifting functionality to be a good idea at all.
And “Just typing the name” is what you did in MS/DOS, but then you only had, like, four apps in your PC. In KDE, the names certainly Karacter (sorry!), but there are a lot of them to remember, the names themselves are often less than helpful and, to me, they feel a bit ridiculous. Do I have to remember Akonadi, or Nepomuk, or Krita, or Amarok?
No, no, no. I do believe usability is low. I hope they understand and work to improve it, because the technology is very good.
You only have to type “music”, or “web”, or “mail” and the right entries will come up. No need to type in some obscure name unless you really want to. (And Akonadi/Nepomuk aren’t even programs, they’re servers/APIs that only devs should worry about. Which makes me think that you’re specifically trying to come up with the weirdest sounding names that you can here, even though you don’t use them. Try Palapeli.)
I think that screenshot posted was an older version, maybe KDE4.1. (EDIT: Doh! It’s right there in the screenshot, version 4.0.2, so very very old. The giveaway was the fact that the entry in the taskbar didn’t even have the icon set correctly. Lots of bugs back then.) The newer theme is similar in a lot of ways but definitely different. It does tend to have a somewhat pale theme – but then everyone criticized them for looking too toylike when they used bright colors. I like the photo-realistic style of the icons, which follows what MS and Apple are both doing. The Oxygen widget theme can be a little too low contrast, I think, but it’s being improved over time.
Edited 2009-11-13 08:12 UTC
Perhaps your monitor is broken. Others complain that KDE is overly colourful. Personally, I find it just fine; it’s pleasant while the different elements don’t all scream for attention at the same time. And it’s not like you can’t change it.
SuSE 11.2 is working fine here and KDE 4.3 is the first iteration I’ve found fully usable since the 3.x series a couple of years ago. It’s been a long wait, and I agree about the paleness of the themes. But that is easily fixable by downloading some alternative colour schemes if none of the stock ones is to your taste. That said, I’ve only switched over from Gnome in the past couple of weeks. Gnome worked very well on 11.2 too.
I’ve had no problems installing Nvidia drivers both from source and ready-rolled (as from today) from Nvidia’s Opensuse repos. In fact I’ve been following 11.2 for a while, upgrading through a couple of milestones and an RC from 11.1. It’s been a fairly pain-free experience and the only other distro I could say that of with regard to rolling updates is Debian. However this is undoubtedly easier to do on Debian because there are only three main branches: stable, testing and unstable. There are a many more repos to contend with on SuSE and you have to be very careful about switching between them or your update plans will go boom.
I guess it is too early to say how polished and useful this release will turn out to be. But it is more than enough for me right now, and hats off to the SuSE devs because a great deal of work has clearly gone into this.
Probably no. I’m long time KDE user and switched early to KDE 4, right from 4.0. KDE has come a long way and besides the lack of a truly integrated browser I think it is in fact ready for the masses (kaffeine isn’t perfect either, smplayer does a mucher better job IMO).
And I’m also a long time SuSE user, since version 9 in fact, it’s the distro the gained my heart. I leaved Windows more than 4 years ago and never looked back. But I have to admit that Linux distros in general loose in the small details, just now I had to install libxine-codecs without any hint to be able to listen mp3. I know I had too but what about new users? Looking at thousands of packages isn’t a straight forward job. If WE want to “k”onquer desktop users we must provide them a 100% pain free experience. And this is where I take my hat off to Canonical’s work with Ubuntu.
No live cd images up there yet, although the download page says they should be there. Live GNOME cd, where are you?
Hm? Go to http://www.opensuse.org, click Get It, click the image type you want to download, off you go…
Seems to be working now, but yesterday clicking on the live media did nothing. Time to try this out, I’m hoping for a speed improvement as compared to 11.1.
This page should give you an overview of what’s done:
http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/FirefoxIntegration
It includes things like KDE icons, file dialogs, file associations, button ordering, etc.
They’ve also disabled PulseAudio on KDE installations, although it will still be on if you install GNOME.
Edited 2009-11-12 23:45 UTC
Would you think that Opensuse provides the best KDE experience right now? I have been reading the release notes and this release looks really promising. I don’t want to update right now since I’m in the middle of some projects but I’m really looking forward to it
First SUSE I used was 5.2 and the fonts have been consistently ugly and too small by default ever since back then.
No other Linux distro shows this problem.
Why?
A good distribution. Their KDE4 isn’t quite as functional as the Mandriva one, but you can still install KDE3, if you so wish.
An easy way of doing so is adding an openSUSE 11.1 DVD as installation source (pattern KDE3 will reappear) plus:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE3/openSUSE_11.2/ (mantained by the openSUSE KDE Team)
And, if you wish:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Community/openSUSE_1… (packaged by the commnity, good quality overall, IMO).
They stuck more to defaults!
Gnome is outright a pain to use with their ‘slab’ menu. Sure, it’s no problem if you’re sitting straight up to your keyboard and you can type something in to find the app you’re looking for, but for those who like to lay back and do everything with the mouse, like play solitaire.
Then when you do configure it with the normal Gnome menu, the menus are setup with too many sub menus! Even if you install the gnome-menus-upstream to make it more like the standard menus, then it takes all of the billion things that are in the Yast control panel and gives them individual menu entries, so your System > Administration menu ends up going way off the screen.
Talk about a usability nightmare.
Now on to KDE4. It has seen some serious love lately, and I think the openSUSE version is pretty close to default. I’m with pretty much everyone else though, the menu sucks. Though I do give it props for being pretty different than others, and that it would work really well with a touch screen with gestures. I do have a tablet, and as soon as I can get all the multi-touch stuff working, hopefully I’ll be able to use that on the menu. A few quick flicks with a pen or fingertip and you’ve got solitaire (by the way, solitaire on a touch screen is the ultimate in awesome)
I try to look at UIs now with how they would work with keyboard only, keyboard / mouse, keyboard / mouse / pen, keyboard / mouse / pen / touch screen, pen / touch screen, or just touch screen.
If we can get a menuing system that wins on all those levels at the same time, and is easy on the eyes, it’s a win all around.
The hardest is to get one that works well on a touch screen though. The icons / menu entries have to be just the right size otherwise it’s hard to pinpoint with a fingertip. A good example of this is the shutdown button on Windows 7.
Anyhow, just some quick thoughts. I wouldn’t really have a problem with using openSUSE except for the Gnome menus being jacked. Other than that, it’s a good desktop OS.
and it’s the first KDE4 distro that runs snappy on my laptop. The other distros out this fall are probably working as well, I just haven’t tried any of them yet. A few things that still aren’t quite polished, but I’ve been pretty impressed. This is worlds apart from 11.1 as far as the KDE experience goes.
KDE3 fans can stop the carnage by starting their own distros. In Jan 08, Aaron Seigo wrote that KDE3 would be supported as long as there were users. KDE3 still has plenty of users, but it has lost the distros. The users can stop the carnage by starting their own small distros, dedicated to KDE3 and only KDE3.
I have nothing against KDE4 or Novell or anyone. “Free as in Freedom” means that Novell has every right to scramble to get in on the Next Big Thing as corporations are wont to do, and not only do developers not only have every right to devote themselves to the future, their pursuit is noble and praiseworthy. But “Free as in Freedom” also means that users can keep KDE 3 if they want, and if they don’t they shouldn’t complain about the developers and the corporations.
My homemade live cd is called Kiara, a recursive acronym for “Kiara Is A Recursive Acronym”. It’s based on Slax 6.1.2, with packages ported from Slackware 12.2. I’m building for security, in case I have to run the same basic CD till KDE 5 comes out or longer. The mission of Kiara is keeping KDE3 as alive as possible, for as long as necessary, no matter what, even if I personally switch to KDE4. As a matter of fact, I have Kubuntu with KDE 4.3 installed on my hard drive. I’m not against KDE 4, although I dislike using it directly. I find it sort of bland and not much fun, and prefer to run KDE4 applications (still the best apps available IMO) in fluxbox. Even if I dislike using it, I recognize that it is important work, and I support it. Some people confuse community with conformity, and think that we need to be running the same version to have a united community, and that is the logic that has divided the community. There is no logic that says KDE4 requires the murder of KDE3, except perhaps on a distro to distro basis, but there are hundreds of distros. There should be a place for us, and there will be if we make one, because we are free to do so.
I release a new Kiara CD weekly, and have for five weeks. The latest seems not quite ready for prime time, but just about “ready for late night “. You can download it at
http://www.thekiarablog.blogspot.com
Where were you when we (openSUSE KDE team) were calling for people to maintain KDE 3? We would have had a 11.2 KDE 3 iso and everything!
I don’t know whether you like openSUSE but if you are interested in taking over KDE 3 for a big distro instead of a homebrew, we would give you plenty of help doing this…
We’ve many users who say they want KDE 3 (but despite our best efforts, don’t want to do a bit of maintenance of already-packaged software) look for me in #opensuse-kde on FreeNode or [email protected].
First of all: I’m not an Opensuse-Fan. I prefer BSD and KISS-Distributions, like Slackware, Arch Linux, Frugalware, etc.
11.2 looks nice.
I haven’t it much until now, but there were two things which are negative:
First of all the radeon driver which has been used by default didn’t work. Well, actually it worked in the sense of displaying Xorg, but at the KDE4 loading screen it didn’t finish loading. I had to boot in failsafe mode and get an other driver. The ATI repos didn’t work. That was sad, but not the fault of the OpenSuse project I guess.
The ATI driver (from the ATI/AMD website) also had problems. It wasn’t able to create an RPM. It only said that it had an error creating it and I didn’t find out how to make it verbose (I only wanted to get it running fast). So I had to install it the default way without RPM. This worked and I tried compositing the very first time. Looks nice, but somehow it has problems and I have to manually activate it after the login. Since I’m not a fan of this 3D eye candy stuff anyway I disabled it again.
The second thing is about file system encryption. I read it is the first version able to completely encrypt the system. It’s great this is possible, but I really want to to see PAM based ENCFS support, because I think that better fits most user. So it’s not really a problem but a feature request and I am mentioning it here to make more people aware
What I found very nice is that everything was very up to date. Okay, Firefox is 3.5.4 (3.5.5 is the new version), but I guess that’s okay, when it gets updated fast.
Oh, one last thing: I have been using the German version and there were some untranslated strings. Since I know some older, not that experienced persons using OpenSuse I think full translations are very important for Systems used on desktops.
All in all it’s very nice and generally feels faster than the 10.2 version (which was the last one I tried).
I won’t stick to it, because it’s not a KISS-Distribution. I mainly tried it to be able to recommend it, if I get asked about it. I will defiantly do so.
What is it with people wanting to show off a theme, and then posting a screenshot that only shows the desktop background, a few (recolored) icons and the panel!?
What do the window decorations look like?
What do GTK and QT widgets look like?
Is compiz active, how is it configured?
I can, of course, google for more screenshots but as an illustrative example, this screenshot (and others like it) sucks.
What is it with people wanting to show off a theme, and then posting a screenshot that only shows the desktop background, a few (recolored) icons and the panel!?
I’ve often wondered about the same thing. Of course, wallpaper is a part of the whole theme and as such it makes sense to show it, but why not do the same as I do; take 2 screenshots and show both? One with no windows open, one with 1-2 windows, preferably ones with lots of various elements in them so the viewer can get a better grasp of the theme as a whole.