For a very long time now, I've been on the hunt for a distribution that really put a lot of effort into their KDE4 implementation. This has been a frustrating search, full of broken installations, incredibly slow performance, and so many visual artifacts they made my eyes explode. Since KDE 4.3 is nearing release, I had to pick up this quest in order to take a look at where 4.3 stands - and I found a home in the KDE version of Fedora 11. Read on for a look as to where KDE 4.3 currently stands.
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Member since:2006-01-03
Member since:2007-03-26
OpenSUSE is a really nice KDE distro. But zypper and yast is killing me. It took a while but eventually it crapped out on me, badly. I really thought that dependency problems were a thing from the past. Sure I abused it, but I've abused apt a lot more with Debian and it never crapped out on me like OpenSUSE.
Don't get me wrong, OpenSUSE is a great distro with lots of easy going configuration and their KDE4 desktop is the best I've tried.
Now I'll take Fedora for a ride!
Member since:2009-07-22
Member since:2005-09-10
OpenSuse is not bad, not bad at all. Coming from Kubuntu it was a great relief to discover the stability of KDE 4.2.x (updated from 4.1.3). However, the package management didn't cut it for me. For one thing, it was slow, way-way slower then Kubuntu (that's the only thing at this point going for Kubuntu). I had several problems with timeouts, especially the pacman repository, and bad synthesis.* (or something like that) downloads.
One-click-install never worked as advertised, except for the simplest packages out there. If you wanted to use it for anything complex, it would error out on some dependencies. But the worst problem was that if I wanted to have up-to-date packages for KDE, I had to change to KDE:Factory repo. It would have been fine if it was a one-time change, but later I learned that I have to keep an eye on Factory (read planetsuse, etc) because the content might change unexpectedly. Finally, I found it too much a hassle, plus SuSE in general seemed to be slower then the competition (especially startup times).
I ended up with Mandriva 2009 spring. Mandriva has all the polish of opensuse, plus a great KDE menu alternative similar to classic style but better (looks and good organization).
Don't get me wrong - if opensuse's package management works for you, there is no reason to switch. When it comes to KDE implementation, they are absolutely on par - I like Mandriva's more (because of the menu plus the default wallpaper), but that's just personal preference. Both are way better then Kubuntu.
The last Kubuntu that worked well for me was Feisty, but I kept using it through gutsy and hardy in the hopes that it would improve. Instead it went down down down - like my extra keys on my notebook stopped working in Gutsy, Hardy was a disaster when it came to the quality of packages (like they had both gwenview and kipi-plugins for KDE 4 in the repo, but the plugins wouldn't show up, and half a dozen other problems showing that the only QA they had was "if it compiles and installs it's good to go").
One downside of Mandriva was that it was a bit slower with updates, and I ended up using Fedora 11 like the author. However, I'm planning on switching back to Mandriva once the new version comes out. Fedora has up-to-date, good quality and well tested packages, good package management, and no GUI tools whatsoever (YAST or MCC-like) to configure your system, plus the menu is a terrible mess (like you can expect configuration tools in three different subsections without any apparent logic - administration/system/settings).
Well, the past 6 months was about good KDE implementation hunt for me, and evaluating the big four (Fedora/Mandriva/OpenSuse/Kubuntu) I'd definitely vote for Mandriva, with OpenSuse coming in a strong second position. And when I'm talking of evaluating, I really did use all of these for months (Suse 3, Mandriva 2, been on Fedora for about 1 month, Kubuntu before) on a daily basis to do my non-geeky work, not just install it for a few days or so 
DISCLAIMER: I've written this in a bit of a hurry, so it's bound to be full of spelling mistakes, etc. Spare me.
Member since:2009-07-22
Graphical installations in suse are sometime a bit slow. I admit that. From the console, are always quite fast to me. Comparing to ubuntu, having to add repos and keys and so on is a much broken method than suse click and go or yast way. Just an opinion.
About repos, yes, if you want the last KDE thing, yes, you must be aware of changes. But random users should not worry about that and install actualizations that goes into updates. They should be fine. Anyway, adding a repo is not such a big thing.
From my experience, Mandriva is solid distro for KDE fans.
Member since:2006-05-25
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Member since:
2009-06-30
Let's be fair, zypper is not the perfect package manager BUT it's already very good. IMHO openSUSE KDE integration is by far the best out there.