Announcement

**dmeyer** · Sep 30, 2012, 01:51 PM

I've always found amarok rock stable. If you want a properly fast distro, I can't recommend Arch enough. I used it for a while and found it incredible. It was stable, fast and up to date. Only issue I had was that sometimes bumblebee would break and I found that a bit too inconvenient. Kubuntu has one of the best communities around - very novice friendly. Seriously though, give Arch a spin and try tell me that Pacman isn't the best package manager around...

**ScottyK** · Sep 30, 2012, 03:11 PM

Kubuntu is the distro that I have stuck with the longest. I recently tried out 12.1, and even let it upgrade to 12.2 and overall I was happy with it. But when I built my new system, I put Kubuntu back on it. Why? Because I know how to get everything back to the way I like it. Maybe in the future I'll have more free time to fiddle with the settings of another distro. Right now I need something I can be productive on.

Plus the ubuntu repos have every game that my kids love. Some were missing in the Opensuse repos. They are probably also there (community repo?) but again I know how to get things done in Kubuntu.

**KDE_dude** · Sep 30, 2012, 06:35 PM

I have actually used Chakra a good amount. I like how Pacman uses the terminal, but I still like being able to browse apps and I didn't really like the app center. I did like how it did not crash on me, and it was pretty fast.

**dmeyer** · Oct 01, 2012, 02:01 AM

Yeah openSUSE still has a painful lack of packages. Massively improved the last year or two but still not nearly good enough. Simple things like PyChess or Easystroke are unavailable. Community repositories fix most things but not all which is a huge bummer. Also openSUSE does weird things with the menu. It is super irritating, even with the reduce menu depth I find it somewhat irritating. Good thing I use Krunner for almost everything. They also have an odd package naming format, it makes sense but I prefer the debian naming scheme.

I think Pacman has a front-end or two, from what I remember the front-end was functional. There was Yaourt which was like pacman but it was capable of searching AUR and other things but you weren't supposed to use it with pacman. Chakra is too dogmatic about QT for me. Of all the distros Kubuntu undoubtedly strikes the best balance of any distro I have worked with for Propriety/OSS,QT/GTK, Codecs and just about every choice. That's why it is the best newbie KDE distro.

**KDE_dude** · Oct 01, 2012, 05:27 AM

I think it was Yaourt that I used as a package manager, but I just did not like it compared to Muon and the Ubuntu Software Center. Is it possible to install Synaptic on Kubuntu? I really like to use that too.

**jovin** · Oct 01, 2012, 09:19 AM

openSUSE drove me crazy. YaST is just too much... seriously, too much of a pain to work with.
Thousand different windows opened, another popup here and there and everytime the same thing if you want to look something up.
What I found funny as well;
I don't know what they did to Kopete, but when I used Kopete under openSUSE 12.2 KDE 4.9 the messages were always chopped at the end and the sentence stacked itself.
Then there's my dvd drive... it always opened when I booted into openSUSE.

So many (small) things that made my experience a bad one.

openSUSE will never leave a VM ever again.

**oshunluvr** · Oct 01, 2012, 09:39 AM

OpenSUSE is the distro eventually led me to Kubuntu. All the websites touted OpenSUSE as THE best KDE distro. The third time in two weeks I ended up in RPM hell and I went looking elsewhere...

...thank goodness.

**KDE_dude** · Oct 06, 2012, 07:28 PM

Why is it that everyone thinks openSUSE is the best?

**sumski** · Oct 06, 2012, 08:49 PM

Not sure *everyone* thinks that

I have moved back to openSUSE, so here's a few points from my perspective:
Advantages (at least for me):
OBS - what a fantastic project/service. One can't just find software, it can also submit bugfixes to other repos, so as to official distro updates. You pretty much have all existing KDE software there, and also it builds for all currently supported distro's (11.4/12.1/12.2/Factory) and KDE version (ranging from 4.6 to what will be 4.10). Whole distribution is developed there. It a rather interesting model. Different to other distros which have stable releases and current development 'release'. All new software goes there. With suse you have one step before that. Every piece of software is developed in Devel project (so e.g. udev is developed at Base:System project, and after is tested there it goes to Factory).

Kernel - While this is highly subjective matter, i feel most safe with it's kernel, both in terms of stability and speed.

Package management - zypper is really blazing fast, and has rather nice features (vendors/priority, etc...)

Yast - great stuff. Besides of Qt and gtk interfaces, there also ncurses 'interface', and offcourse editing configurations by hand

Disadvantages:

Packagekit and apper aren't mature enough yet, and yast's installer can be clumsy. That's where zypper comes in

Not so in-your-face-user-friendly as some other distros. More often then not one has to roll his sleeves to fix something or to adjust something to their likeing

It has a steep learning curve to those coming from other distros, but once you get to know the tools, you will LOVE it

**SteveRiley** · Oct 06, 2012, 09:40 PM

Sumski --

1. Is Mono a core ingredient of OpenSUSE? Because Novell was such a fan of that, I had somewhat assumed that OpenSUSE would rely on the toolkit for certain tasks. The presence of Mono can be a reason some folks might not consider the distro.

2. Aside from the OBS, what would you say are OpenSUSE's advantages over the other big RPM distro -- Fedora with KDE?

**dmeyer** · Oct 06, 2012, 10:11 PM

Mono isn't a core component. If you have Quassel you probably have mono. I think I was mono free and then decided I needed it for SpaceChem (HI6 game) and then installed quassel as well.
Sorry to jump in but I think I have enough experience to answer your questions:

They don't push mono at all but they have a very good implementation of it (everybody has a good implementation nowadays though.) Mono, as much as I personally dislike it, is here to stay so I've decided to just live with it,

So OBS aside it has to be the polish. openSUSE is incredibly well polished and incredibly stable. I don't think anybody releases like openSUSE, the documentation is amazing if you know how to navigate it, it has a good guide to getting started and a ton of hidden features. Fedora - I have always found - wasn't very stable for me and didn't really put the effort into a good KDE implementation. Others might have had a different experience but I can honestly say I have never had a nice experience with Fedora. Also the installer is fantastic even if it is a bit complicated. Like Sumski said, zypper is great. When I say great I mean its probably the best package manager out there. It has a few quirks like refreshing repositories everytime you install something but that can be disabled. Fedora I feel though still has a slight edge in package availability but that's changing. Although parts of YAST need to be deprecated, there are definitely still some modules that are great and serve their purpose. The apper/packagekit saga is a pain, if you disable automatic update checking then you won't get any problems with it blocking package installation.

Something Sumski didn't mention was the community. openSUSE community as a whole doesn't tolerate idiots. If your question/problem isn't clearly explained or you don't have a basic understanding of linux then they can be awful to deal with. There are a few community members who will reach out but as a whole if you need help and you ask for it in the right way then you will get fantastic support.

By the way you forget about Mageia and PCLinuxOS, both are fairly big, rpm based and desktop orientated.

**sumski** · Oct 06, 2012, 10:22 PM

1) Wouldn't say that it is

:

Code:

zypper se -si mono
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
No packages found.

Haven't looked deeper, i guess it's surely installed on a GNOME pattern (can't be sure)

2) If you put aside availability of various KDE software, it comes to 2 things (that comes right on my mind):

a) For some reason i (and not just me) have the feeling it much stable and a bit faster than implementations on other distros (including Kubuntu, Arch, etc).
Distribution as a whole is KDE-centric, so there is no compromising to other DE's.
Altough, those 'tweaks' can lead to something like this

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=303576

b) Large number of packages have so called 'branding' counterparts (this is not limited to KDE, so eg systemd also have branding-upstream and branding openSUSE), for example, kde-workspace
You have kdebase4-workspace-branding-upstream and kdebase4-workspace-branding-openSUSE. With the latter you get that nice greenish looks

, and with upstream branding you get upstream's vanilla looks/settings (i could compare this to kubuntu-default-settings). On a clean install you always get suse's branding, but you can always go to vanilla 'branding' (saying 'branding' cause that doesn't only mean the looks but also configuration)

c) Large number of community contributors to KDE packaging, much of them (former) upstream

Those would be 'bonuses' from my perspective (for me the #1 is the manner and speed of getting it, and the easiness to contribute back), for an 'Average Joe' (who and where is he?), i guess it would be availability alone (so you don't have to upgrade entire distro to get the next version, or you don't get next version by updateing only through regular updates chanell - looking at you, Fedora

)