A Sixth Venture Into Linuxland

Last week I read a couple positive reviews of Novell's OpenSuSE 10.1 release and decided to give linux yet another chance to become my main desktop OS. I've tried this several times before, starting with RedHat 7.3, then Mandrake 8 and 9, SuSE Linux 9, and most recently (last year) an attempt to get Gentoo up and running. The biggest "failure" was likely Gentoo, since I only had it up in a VM and once I installed it (an invigorating, nerdy exercise), I barely touched it.

As a desktop OS, my previous experiences with Linux have been disappointing, hence my death grip on Windows. Obviously, the desktop experience in RedHat wasn't anywhere near NT4/2000 at the time I tried it. It was extremely clunky, the GUI (Gnome) was very slow, and it was difficult to discern what apps I needed to use to accomplish my Windows-equivalent tasks. Mandrake was much better from an installation/configuration perspective, but I still found the environment to be more a collection of utilities rather than a single OS. I began using KDE as my window manager/desktop environment and I liked it much better than Gnome. SuSE 9 Pro had better hardware support and package management than Mandrake, but the desktop environment was still clunky, and it still wasn't obvious where I had to go or what utilities I needed to use for basic system admin tasks. I'd consult texts or online resources for answers to those questions, and instead of finding a simple "To do this, use this like this", I found "You can do this with aaa, bbb, ccc, ddd, eee, fff". Well great, that's a nice selection of tools, but how do you use them? (I know, RTFM...)

Enough background, on to my initial impressions of OpenSuSE 10.1. I installed it last night in a VM, and it took about an hour to complete. I pretty much accepted the default settings and chose KDE (v3.4) as my desktop. The installer correctly identified my VM hardware, including video and network, I didn't have to configure any of it. The only change I made was the screen resolution. After setting a root password and creating an account for myself, setup was complete. I would put that installation on par with that of Windows XP. Simple, and results in an initial setup that "just works" (you anti-MS folk can insert a virus/security joke here).

Reboot, and I see a typical linux boot process, with lines of text explaining each event occurring while the OS initializes. Once that's finished I was presented with a very nice looking graphical login screen, kind of a mix between Windows XP and OS X. I logged in and was dumped into KDE 3.4. Nice. Graphically, I am really impressed with KDE. The window frames look professional, the KDE menu is well organized. I didn't have a chance to do much else but test out Konqueror, KDE's file/web browser. I was curious to see how certain sites looked, since Apple's Safari is based on the Konqueror rendering engine. Sites like CBS Sportsline are obviously targeted for IE, and until Firefox 1.3 was released I couldn't use another browser to view them. However, I was pleased to find that Konqueror displayed CBS' page just fine. The page rendered properly, and all the client-side javascript appeared to be working as expected.

My initial impression of this linux distro is very positive. My only beef so far is that the desktop environment still seems a bit slow, but I think that's because it's running in a VM. Assuming all goes well with further testing, I'll install it on my workstation and find out just how slow or fast it really is.