Star openSUSE 11.0: 'Smooth Outside, Rough Inside'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 1st Jul 2008 15:03 UTC, submitted by sb56637
SuSE, openSUSE Most reviews - so far - of openSUSE 11.0 have been quite positive, but that doesn't automatically mean everybody is happy. TechReview offers some criticism of the latest offering from openSUSE. "openSUSE 11.0 is a difficult system to qualify. Highlights include good availability of current packages and YAST GUI configuration tools for some advanced features. However, these advantages are largely eclipsed by a chaotic, dysfunctional package management system and marginal performance. New Linux users with more complex network configurations or challenging hardware may be forced to use openSUSE due to its unique innovations in GUI system configuration. Yet, experienced and inexperienced users alike may find themselves increasingly frustrated by the grave lack of refinement in what is an otherwise capable Linux distribution."
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apokryphos
Member since:
2007-05-05

It would've been nice if you raised some actually valid criticisms. openSUSE has one of the fastest ever start-up times (see the sneak peeks article on this), YaST and package management (including the new updater) are incredibly fast (almost instant) and it's also less intensive than its competitors (yum, smart) -- again, see the sneak peeks article.

If you have any valuable criticism to raise, please do; but don't just mention completely unsubstantiated troll remarks.

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broch Member since:
2006-05-04

shrug, no suse never enjoyed fast boot. I know, I was using suse for pretty long time. You can cut down all services, compile custom kernel, clean DE. Still suse is slow.
same goes with package management which is for unknown reason simply bad always coping with bizarre dependencies.

If you compare different versions of suse, you may notice changes, some for better some for worse. However when comparing suse boot time or package management to other distros it is evident that suse falls somewhere in the middle of the pack.

The article criticisms are valid, it is really difficult to find a place where suse will shine.

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elsewhere Member since:
2005-07-13

You can cut down all services, compile custom kernel, clean DE. Still suse is slow.
same goes with package management which is for unknown reason simply bad always coping with bizarre dependencies.


I won't argue about boot times etc., since openSUSE doesn't pretend to be a lightweight distro.

But complaining about package management in 11.0 is just wrong. The performance is outstanding, the needless repo refreshes in Yast PM are a thing of the past, and the new satsolver dependency handler doesn't have the old dependency quirks.

Combined with the ever-increasing array of packages in the build-service, package handling on openSUSE is now a jewel rather then a sore point.

I think it's a milestone improvement that the comparisons with apt-deb have been reduced from performance and package availability, to the fact that it doesn't easily remove orphaned libraries. ;)

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