Guest post by openSUSE 11.4 is out and is not only the first major linux distro to ship LibreOffice, Firefox 4 and Scribus 1.4 in a release but also brings new cool stuff like Tumbleweed. The community delivers unique technologies around it like SUSE Studio and OBS. Read more about openSUSE 11.4 in the extensive Product Highlights and see screenshots here.
A huge thanks and a round of applause to the openSUSE developers.
The openSUSE team has made a lot of mature, well thought-out decisions recently, and the project is growing and improving constantly. Some really exceptional features of openSUSE include: the SUSE build service, SUSEstudio, and the new Tumbleweed repository. openSUSE also continues to be one of the very few distros that actually cares about desktop-agnostic GUI system configuration tools; the latest YaST works via QT, GTK, console, and now even through a web interface.
openSUSE is very far from perfect. It has inherited much of the cruft, bugs, chaos, and instability of the libre software ecosystem. And they don’t have resources to fix it all. But they are trying, and it’s definitely good enough for my laptop. It’s a truly unique, well managed, outstanding project in a sea of mediocrity.
I’ve been running Linux for over 10 years and running many major distros and other not so known distributions. I’ve mainly been a Fedora user and did the ubuntu thing since it was in alpha but I don’t like the direction they are going. I’ve also been a GNOME user pretty much the whole time with a little flux, open, kde and xfce here and there but I also don’t like the direction GNOME 3.0 is going either.
So I’m testing KDE out and this is a great release, everything works so far, 11.3 had some weird an
noyances with it and I hadn’t ran it since it was called SuSe before that.
I added it to a desktop on day one of the release, liked it enough to move it onto my Macbook Pro as well using a repository that has a lot of mbp/apple packages on the build service.
Look up home:ealin:apple for that if you are interested. I think I will write up a how too, I have a 5.3 and I’m very impressed.
I’m also interested in Tumbleweed as well, hope it works out.
OpenSuSe has one of the nicest installers around.
Looks great. A shame that whatever theme the installer is using (the green scrollbars/progressbars) isn’t the default for KDE4. Although I’m sure someone could hack up a Qtcurve theme really quick.
openSuSE 11.2 has very bad font-rendering in Gnome.
I tried to post to the openSuSE form but got no answers.
How is it in 11.4?
Edited 2011-03-12 21:48 UTC
It isn’t bad at all, when I had played around with 11.3 I had found this:
http://opensuse-community.org/SubpixelHinting
I’ve found Fedora to have some of the best around but 11.4 isn’t bad at all, looks much cleaner than it has been in the past.
Tried Slackware, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Gentoo, FreeBSD and NetBSD. Fiddled with almost all WM/DE available to linux/BSD. Xfce (mainly) and KDE were always my favorite ones, but I have to confess that the later releases of KDE (4.6.x) is where I am expending more and more time. It is very polished and functional.
All I have to say is that openSUSE with KDE 4.6.1 is the system I like at most, more than ever OSX and Windows 7, both of them nice systems too.
Many thanks to all people involved on its development, you did a commendable job.