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A while back I wrote about my experience installing openSUSE 10.3, and today I decided to share some of my impressions of the openSUSE 10.3 desktop.

Overall, openSUSE seems much more polished and professional than Ubuntu. It comes with nice default graphical startup and shutdown screens and the text details look nice too. The default Log-in and Log-out sounds are very pleasant. A Tango-ish Industrial icon theme is used by default, and custom splashscreens have been made for applications such as OpenOffice. Green and blue are nice colors for an operating system, but I’m not sure if I like the complementary yellow (but then again themes are highly subjective plus easily changed, so it doesn’t matter).

Speaking of theme changes, one of the first changes I made was to increase the font dpi to 96 to make them readable, and change the fonts to DejaVu Sans with subpixel rendering (which actually works under openSUSE). I changed the theme controls to the familiar Clearlooks (which for some reason seems slightly different than Ubuntu’s version?), and also looked at some of the other very nice themes and backgrounds included by default.

I noticed Slab menu and Clock applet’s text was slightly cut off using the Clearlooks theme. While I was looking at panel applets, I also noticed that the Clock applet in openSUSE includes a world time feature, and that one of my favorite Tomboy features, To Do Lists, is also included (the To Do List feature is not included in the current Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron version of Tomboy). I tried to add the Deskbar applet, but it immediately crashed instead. This was the first of the few problems I had with openSUSE.

I had very few problems running openSUSE. Some things were unfamiliar and different, such as the use of gnomesu instead of gksudo, the Slab menu, and the Yast2 Control Panel, but the biggest problem, one I had anticipated, was package management. I was surprised at how easy it was to add repositories. I simply opened the Installation Sources tool and added some of the repositories for my favorite software listed on this page. Installing software from the repositories was not incredibly difficult, just a little different from what I was used to, but upgrading was very unintuitive. I had a number of updates available that were the Update Notifier applet failed to notify me about. I installed apt-for-rpm and synaptic, which made things a little more familiar, but everything about rpm package management just seemed very slow and unintuitive. I experienced a taste of so-called dependency hell while attempting to update, which was very frustrating because I used the official repositories listed on the official openSUSE website.

One positive about openSUSE’s software is that the default selection includes some of my favorite applications and games, some of which have been modified and improved. I was excited when OpenOffice.org loaded after its professional-looking splash without the font rendering problems which plague the Ubuntu version. The Microsoft TrueType core fonts are also included by default, which boosts openSUSE’s compatibility. Firefox too has its improvements. openSUSE’s Firefox uses native tabs and its menus have icons just like any other application. The form widgets are not fixed in the openSUSE version, which was a disappointment, as was running Evolution and Banshee expecting improvements in them as well (especially as they are both Novell apps). I was about to shut down the system for the night a little disappointed when I noticed another modification, in the shut down dialog.

Novell is working very hard to create a Linux distribution that is polished and professional, and easy to use by a wide variety of people. I believe they are succeeding in openSUSE, but there is still a ways to go. I look forward to testing openSUSE 11!

Tags: openSUSE