Mad Penguin has published a review of SUSE 10.1, including info on multimedia, XGL/Compiz, and a flash movie of the installation. They conclude: “The desktop itself is one to be reckoned with. I was able to be instantly productive with this release of SUSE. I didn’t need to “fiddle” with anything outside of getting multimedia support back in place, but that’s another argument for another day isn’t it? The bottom line is that I was able to install the OS and apps, sit down, and go right to work.”
pity, as I wanted a read at that, I am eagerly awaiting my dvd download to complete, but it still got 2 days to go
however, 10.0 was also an excellent system and I was able to stick the install disk in then forget it, and after 40mins or so, I had a fully functioning desktop.
extras were gratefully received from packman and guru
oh, a nice program I found that only seems to work on suse is Lin3gp, for converting your films into a format that plays on mobile phones and ipod like devices.
It looks like the site as been OSNewsed
Can you not upgrade using the package manager?
Suse looks nice and polished. I like the GUI configuration tool for XGL. Anytime I tried running it though, it always felt sluggish.
I’m running it right now on one of my workstations, and it is actually pretty smooth…if it’s slowing my system down it is so negligible that I haven’t paid it any attention. OpenGL performance isn’t quite as good as it was, but that was expected (I can still play Wolfenstein, etc. with it on, but I run my games from a console anyway).
Athlon 2400+
1Gb DDR400 system memory
GeForce FX5600
On my home machine, which has better specs (running a 10,000 rpm raptor sata drive and an FX5900 on a hyperthreaded P4) it absolutely screams.
I’ve got an old PC at home that I run Linux on. It’s an Athlon K7 1GHz, nVidia TNT2 Pro w/ 16MB of RAM and 512MB of RAM. I tried Suse 9.something on it and it was unusably slow. Mandrake was a bit sluggish but Debian and, lately, Ubuntu run really well on it. It’s not sluggish at all…
I have a Coppermine 1GHz with 512mb SDRAM. And I’ve ran almost every version of SuSE on it (including OES and SLES) and it runs fine for me. As it is just acting as a file server for me, I don’t usually install a DE on it, CLI is fine for my purposes. I have used XFCE and IceWM on it at different times and they ran quite fast, but even KDE (I haven’t tried gnome recently) ran pretty well (certainly much better than XP would on the same specs). Don’t get me wrong, I love KDE as a full featured DE, but if you’re running a slower machine, you should try just CLI, or a lightweight window manager.
This thing occurred to me: every screenshot of a fancy Xgl-drawn desktop or instructions to use Xgl concentrate on the Gnome DE. As I am more of a KDE person, I’d like to know if the fancy windows (wobbling and stuff) are only available on Gnome or can I expect reasonably good results trying to use KDE with Xgl?
PS.Xgl/Compiz has quite blown apart my nice newbie understanding of how desktops and windowing work on Linux (KWin on top of KDE on top of X.Org) so if I have misunderstood something or have falsely expressed myself then all corrections are appreciated.
There’s a compiz-kde package on (K)Ubuntu that you can install. I’m sure there are similar packages for any XGL distros
I’m running Suse 10.1 with Xgl and KDE right now. Works fine using these instructions http://en.opensuse.org/Using_Xgl_on_SUSE_Linux.
Just replace the compiz startup command with
compiz –replace wobbly fade minimize cube rotate zoom scale move resize place switcher water &
Using the decoration module under KDE will actually remove any and all window title bars.
I set that up as well…it seems to make the taskbar not function properly “out of the box” and I didn’t feel like taking the time to figure out how to fix it. Maybe that should be a project for a rainy day soon…
Using compiz under KDE is just a temporary solution; the KDE devs have promised something similar to be built into KDE4 natively.
In particular I have heard that the KDE systray can make kde-compiz freeze up, so try removing it from the panel when you play around.
I just spent 32 hours downloading the DVD (the 5 CDs when faster actually), then spent close to an hour with the install. Lets be frank here. SUSE’s install design is stuck in 2002. Xandros pretty much cleaned everyone’s clock in that deparment and no one seems to have matched in since. But today’s innovation in installer is a LiveOS with an install script on the Desktop –pioneered by distros like Mepis and Gobo. The next Ubuntu release is going this route and it looks sweet, though it’s still alpha quality at the moment.
As for the SUSE Desktop. Well it’s all there and well laid out, but it feels “heavy”. Everthing the system does seems to take a lot of CPU cycles. Indeed, SUSE’s philopshy seems to be “give em the kitchen sink too” and while that seems like a nice thing to do, it’s also it’s undoing.
IMHO 8/10.
10 min searching google for the fastest server + 10 min downloading iso for network install + 2hrs installation.
Maybe you have been installing different distro?
Suse is not heavy, I think that 10.1 is faster (slightly) than 10.0
I’ve never had a problem with YaST…
If you feel it’s heavy and offers too much, you should do a custom install and pick out exactly which packages you want…
I couldn’t keep it loaded long enough to read but I did notice the powered by freebsd logo at the bottom of madpenguin.org. lol
Why gnome 2.12 ??
having tasted the XGL/Compiz goodness on the Dapper Flights, but I relented and reformated my SuSE 10 lappy and installed Suse 10.1.
Damn! so nice, Even with my ATI Mobile Radeon U1 (radeon 7000) XGL/Compiz is wonderfull.
So I’m still interested in Ubuntu, but it will now be relegated to my test/play computer and Suse 10.1 is now my production machine.
I could not believe the product Novell has managed to ship with Suse 10.1 – After 3 years of installing everything from OpenBSD, Slax, Gentoo, and more, I have a desktop orientated linux distribution which is rock solid, stable, full of (productivity enhancing) eye candy, has an enourmous range of packages, and looks the part. My frustration with the state of the Linux Desktop had me wanting a Mac the last year (I planned to buy one next week) – but not anymore. The Linux Desktop is here.
SUSE 10.1 is definitely faster than 10.0. I run it (with KDE!!) on am ancient 300MHz system with 128MB RAM. I was really pleasantly surprised.
My only complaint is that the installation is gigantic. I can’t figure out what’s taking up all the space, because it doesn’t seem to have a lot more programs installed by default than, say, MEPIS or Kubuntu, which are much smaller.
What amazed me afer using linux distros with no exception, how slow they are in comparison with even betas of Solaris of FreeBSD; But what amazed me more is how slow and buggy SUSE was given the huge bells and wistles around it. Now, with v 10.1 I could finally feel the speed difference with earlier versions even running glxgears works fine without bugs and reporting a decent 1800 FPS on GF4 Ti 4600 card.
My claims to speed and bugginess was confirmed by Linus Dorvalds himself couble of weeks ago when he said It’s time to kill the bugs rather than introduce features.
After all, good job Novell!
I’ve used every version of SuSE since 7.3 but by around 9.1 the whole thing had become so slow that I started to use Debian as my main distro with SuSE as a back-up. The speed issues seem to have been laid to rest in 10.1 which flies on my PC and is as fast as Debian. It does use quite a chunk of ram, though, but there is plenty to spare.
There are a few issues with 10.1. Sax2 seems to be causing problems for some folks, I haven’t yet got wifi running and the new Rug-Zen package manager is still in development and pretty wonky. Revises will be issued in the next few weeks apparently. In addition, you need to know your way around adding extra repositories for non-oss or restricted downloads, which I guess a new user might find a pain. Otherwise, it has been plain sailing and a pretty easy installation.
Aside from these small things, I really like SuSE for the reasons I always have done. It is a quality product offering the best in KDE, and it gives me everything I could want and then some. If you don’t need a full-up, multi-CD Windows replacement, then I guess Ubuntu is the obvious alternative, but it you want the Full Monty on a silver platter SuSE is very hard to beat, imho. I just hope they keep up the good work and their good rep and don’t become a buggy community distro like a certain piece of headgear. SuSE have always had more class than that and Novell would be mad to squander it.
I installed 10.1 on my Athlon 2800+ laptop amd I thought it rocked. To me, Suse is a professional looking and acting distro. Unfortunately, I have to use an application called Parallels that must run as a kernel module. I installed Suse’s kernel source, but I received many compile errors running the parallels-config command (that compiles the kernel module). I wound up switching to Ubuntu 6.06 Beta 2, and Parallels compiled fine. I wonder what Suse does different in regard to the kernel source. This worked fine with Suse 10.0. Oh well, these are normal problems. As a desktop, I still feel it is exceptional.
It works – is very polished as always – the new Novell zen package management still seems to suck a little bit ATM – I have to check out the GNOME version .
SuSE always installs tons of packages no-one needs or will ever see – that propably explains the install size .
Beagle (Kerry) integration is very nice !
Amazing what kind of rubbish accumalates over the years
– again & again .
Running KDE with the usual few startup progs over the years the number of processes has I guess increased from about 75 to now roughly 100 – well my observation .
Generally fast enough – with AMD 2500 & 650 MB RAM .
Software installation in Suse 10.1 just plain sucks.
I love Suse and I use it all the time, both at home and professionally, but Suse has screwed up what could have been a killer package. Suse 10 and all previous versions work just fine, but management, induced by the Ximian guys, made a political decision to include zmd.
Some packages do not install, other do some of the time and most of the time, things that used to take seconds now take minutes while zmd eats away at your CPU. After watching my computer come to a crawl I decided to investigate.
I knew this zmd shit was evil. I just wasn’t aware how evil it was. I had zmd eating CPU like crazy and I couldn’t kill it no matter what I did.
So I rebooted the machine, told the crappy update-manager icon to not load on start-up and to be sure it was gone just did the following in my box:
ps aux | grep “zmd”
Here’s what it responded, right after a reboot:
root 2778 3.1 1.0 63764 16424 ? SNsl 19:30 0:04 zmd /usr/lib/zmd/zmd.exe
So, no wonder this shit is buggy. It is probably written in C# using the mono-libraries, exactly the best choice for a low-level service that needs to be reliable. NOT!
The inclusion of this untested piece of shitware had the digital fingerprits of the ximian-monkeys all over it and now it’s been confirmed.
A true crying shame too, because the non-profits where I work had loved Suse 9.3 and Suse 10 and were ready to move to Suse Enterprise for their desktops and servers, but I cannot trust an organization, (Yes this means you Novell) that will allow politics to reign over good software engineering.
It is absolutely clear that the only reason that “zmd” was included in Suse 10.1 is to appease a political faction within Novell.
Many other things are very impressive about Suse 10.1, but software installation is virtually impossible, always unreliable. I will keep Suse 10 on my laptop as I have been very satisfied with it, but I will have to look for a new distribution for my main desktop and potential customers.
If you think I am the only one having issues or making shit up, look at what some of the most talented developers in our community have to say about zmd:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2006/05/suse-101.html
http://jamesots.blogspot.com/2006/05/ziprugenypp.html
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2025
So stop astroturfing. Nobody who has used this for more than a few minutes can be so full of compliments for a piece of software which is clearly still at the early beta stage. It might be very impressive to get XGL running but what good does that do if I can maintain my desktops and servers by installing, removing or updating software in a timely, efficient and reliable manner?
Edited 2006-05-23 01:05
So stop astroturfing. Nobody who has used this for more than a few minutes can be so full of compliments for a piece of software which is clearly still at the early beta stage. It might be very impressive to get XGL running but what good does that do if I can maintain my desktops and servers by installing, removing or updating software in a timely, efficient and reliable manner?
Nobody that has used Suse 10.1 for any amount of time has any praise for package management, it sucks monkey balls. Everybody but Novell realizes that, and even the Suse developers are apologetic.
I suspect I can drive to the airport, fly down to Utah, grab a cab to Novell HQ, find an engineer to burn some packages to a CD for me, head back to the airport, fly back, fight traffic driving home and then proceed to install those packages from CD, all in less time than Yast/zmd will update it’s package listing.
Or, I could do what most other users have done and use Smart instead. It’s available as part of the distro, supports all of the repos (apt, yast etc.) and arguably does a better job of dependency resolution, particularly when mixing third party repos. Works from CLI, works with a GUI. Even monitors for updated packages. The only shortcoming over zmd that I can see is that it isn’t designed to handle patches. But a working package manager is more important to me than one that can save bandwidth.
It’s a bandaid, but it works. If you check out any of the forums or Suse resources there is step by step info on using it.
Is it acceptable? Depends upon perspective. But it could be that the solid praise for Suse, despite the package management issues (which I will admit cannot be understated), speaks well about it. The rest of the system works well enough that I can ignore the zmd issues because I can work around them.
Just my perspective though. Yours may be different, and you’re certainly entitled to your opinion. Just saying you shouldn’t question everyone else’s on the basis of your own.
I have to agree; I was not in love with the old YaST package manager; but the new on is even slower. I waited five minutes the other day just to add a new repository to YaST.
I haven’t been able to get the new update applet to work at all, but it sure *looks* nice. Weirdly, the old update applet is present in YaST but doesn’t show any patches. The whole setup is pretty confusing.
And why did we have to lose the nVidia and wlan firmware patches? Those were so convenient…
I think you got lucky jaykayess, when I added a new repository/catalogue/whatever it’s called (!) to YaST I was waiting for more than 30 minutes! lol! zzzz
I agree with you. The new package manager is crap. I just disabled it and installed apt4rpm instead. Now I can update and install packages on my suse box debian style. Apt is way faster.
I’ve also noticed that update-manager is unreliable. I had cashes when installing, updating, solving dependencies. I don’t know what novell is going to do when SUSE Enterprise Desktop 10 customers will flame them about this buggy update-manager.
have been using it on my work laptop for the last week.
but i am worried that we are witnessing the beginnings of an erosion in the quality of what is the premiere KDE desktop for Linux.
why isn’t there an “enable XGL/compiz” button in the KDE control panel as there is under Gnome?
I warn Novell; I like SUSE because of its polish, however I love SUSE because it is the most polished KDE distro. I f that changes then I move on, and I don’t think I will be alone.
Let’s see what 10.2 brings us…………
Novell already tried that(or so the rumors were) a while back and there were so many articles and pundits and talking heads getting on the band wagon…… not to mention the amount of feedback they got from users that they promised they wouldn’t give up on KDE.
I don’t think you’ve gotta worry about it.
Novell really wants to focus in on the business/workstation/server world because that’s where the big money is at(thus their emphasis on GNOME), but Novell also learned that it has a strong distro on it’s hands and that it’s a great home/desktop distro. It’d make zero sense for them to give up on KDE long term, they’d lose alot of people, you *and I* included.
on the other hand, most likely KDE 4 will kick gnome’s ass in such a way it’s possible the Novell managers see their mistake, dump ximian & gnome and go for KDE.
gnome’s don’t want to be eaten by the dragon, so they pus as much investments (waste) in gnome as possible, so the commitment of the managers will increase and they will be reluctant to dump Gnome…
They don’t want to pay Qt licensing costs, that’s about it. Ironic that Novell wants to make money off of FOSS but doesn’t want to support a company that already is.
Why would they pay licensing costs to develop Free software? Why would they use Qt when they develop Mono and GTK# and have a great deal of sucess with them?
They don’t want to pay Qt licensing costs, that’s about it.
Wrong actually. Much of what appears to be going on is a purely political decision. Novell pays for licensing costs for Windows and Microsoft software, pays for Java development tools, pays support costs to JBoss…..
It’s pure internal politics, and has nothing to do with the merits of the software, the quality of the development tools, quality of the framework or the quality of the graphical tools they’ll be producing from that – or even their existing customers. You’ve also got a third side to the company who have an attachment to Netware, and want nothing to do with KDE, Gnome, Mono or Linux.
In short, it’s a huge road accident on three fronts.
Edited 2006-05-23 18:00
The accolades are not all merited for sure. But mostly they are, I think.
I think you are exaggerating the hassles of the zmd package manager stuff a little. Yes, zmd is not good enough as yet. BUT it is not obligatory. As a workaround, delete or neuter the zmd stuff and just use Yast or, say, yum. Another option would be the smart manager, though that tied my machine up at 100 per cent cpu usage for 45 minutes before I killed it and deleted the package. I wonder if smart is ready for prime time too?
A very pertinent question raised by another poster is the degree of SuSE’s commitment to KDE, especially as Ximian Monkeys quickly sicken and die unless fed a daily diet of Gnome washed down with litres of mono. That will do far more to determine the future audience for SuSE than a temporary (one hopes) hiatus in the package mananger. For an awful lot of people, no tiptop KDE = no SuSE.
I installed this distribution after reading the review yesterday. I’ve been a loyal Ubuntu user for some time but the review caught my attention and XGL wasn’t working on my ATI equipped notebook so I gave it a spin.
I must say it’s quite easy to install but:
-While Yast is a nice tool, it’s structure is much to complicated.
-It’s SLOW compared to Ubuntu! Really, I thought all this talk about speed differences between distros was exaggerated, but SuSE just feels really slow.
-XGL works like a charm (after I installed the offical ATI drivers) so that’s cool and also what I downloaded the distro for in the first place.
-When dapper is ready I’m switching right back to Ubuntu, it’s mainly a matter of feel.
Plus:
Beagle
Good-loking Desktop
Easy wide-screen configuration
Minus:
Could not get wireless working (Intel Centrino)
Kynaptic (poor cousin to apt-get)
The minuses outweighed the pluses–I removed SUSE and went back to a Debian-based distro.
I’ve been trying to get apt-get and synaptic installed, using the installer at http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/ , but I can’t seem to get the script to connect to the server and download the packages.
I agree that the ZMD system is junk. Will they release a major fix to it that will get it working, or is it against policy to fix big stuff until the next release?
“It’d make zero sense for them to give up on KDE long term, they’d lose alot of people, you *and I* included.”
as long as Novell know that……….
seriously, i’m not too gloomy about it, for now i’ll take their word that they’ll treat each DE equally, the proof of the pudding will be obvious come the release of 10.2 i guess.
still, niggles such as:
> not including as a default a SUSE sponsored KDE management tool in favour of a foreign Gnome tool on a 10.1 KDE install
> not including an easy “configure XGL” button in KDE as they did for Gnome
does not inspire confidence in how seriously they take their own words…….
So many of these reviewers spend 90% of their time focusing on the installer, and then gloss over things like: removable media, printing, configuration tools… things that will honestly affect you using the system day-to-day.
I have recently been on the receiving end of a new Dell Latitude D620 and as SUSE 10.1 seemed to be the latest distro to surface I thought I’d give it a go.
I admit to being somewhat a SUSE virgin, OK I might have played with a version YEARS ago but initially I was very impressed with the smoothness of the installation. 10.1 was the only version of Linux I’d tried, out of Ubuntu Breezy and Dapper to correctly detect my unusual screen resolution and the resulting desktop did look nice.
However, I agree with what a few people have already mentioned here that too many packages come along for the ride with a “default” installation.
But I guess my major gripe with SUSE is the package management. Being familiar with APT by way of Debian and Ubuntu/Kubuntu I feel spoilt and find it to be really cumbersome with YaST. I am currently looking at attempting to configure Yum as YaST insists on wanting to install packages from the installation DVD and not via my configured HTTP catalogue (even though I’ve already deleted the DVD catalogue!). *sighs*
I’ve got a 19″ widescreen acer lcd running at 1440×900 – anyone else out there get xgl to work with this res or is it just square resolutions that work?
Right now I’m dual booting Linspire 5 and WinXP on my shuttle sbg95v3 nforce3/250 system and would like to play around with xgl, suse 10.1 seems to be the ticket as people with radeons are having luck with it. I’d also like to use virtualization, so something along the lines of VMWare could be what i’m looking for to have a windows virtual machine inside suse (for the wife, she flat out refuses to switch).
Glad I have 3 days off coming up…..
Does anyone know if it’s possible to add the new menu design that they have put in the Enterprise version (set to be released this summer) to SuSE 10.1? I really like the screenshots I’ve seen of the SuSE Enterprise Desktop!
They actually meant OpenSuSE 10.1?Because the retaill (SuSE 10.1) still isn’t avaible,which is a disgrace.
While OpenSuSE whas avaible weeks ago the reatail box still isn’t avaible and i keep hearing it has been postponed.
Is Novell abandoning SuSE Linux (retail box) a la Fedora?
openSUSE is the name of the project, the distribution available for download is SUSE Linux 10.1.
Nevertheless,how good the product itself is,the distribution is flawed to say the least.
I’m not sure where you heard that it’s not available. I received my copy on 5/19/06.
http://www.digitalriver.com/dr/v2/ec_Main.Entry17c?SID=27477&SP=100…
Edited 2006-05-23 16:12
I’m not sure where you heard that it’s not available. I received my copy on 5/19/06.
http://www.digitalriver.com/dr/v2/ec_Main.Entry17c?SID=27477&SP…
All the possible online stores in the Netherlands still haven’t the box and don’t know when it will be there.
The mediamarkt in Germany (Quite a irony since the origin of SuSE)
The official Novell site still mentions preorder.
Edited 2006-05-23 16:20
Just ordered my boxed copy!
Well it looks like Zenworks while a good replacement for SUSE Watcher does have some bugs, at least while on KDE. I’ve since switched to Gnome for several reasons. While I’ve been a KDE fan it’s apparent Novell placed more emphasis with this release on Gnome than on KDE both with layout and how applications performed. While using KDE the new update utility Zenworks either took hours when trying to apply updates or it would just crash entirely. Basically I waisted an entire weekend trying to resolve this issue. Since switching to Gnome the only issue I’ve experienced which was also experienced on KDE is YAST giving the “digital signature failed” for the Gnome repository. I’ve checked several repositories recommended by Novell and all the Gnome ones cause YAST to give this error. Anyway, while I like the improvements it’s apparent as stated that Gnome is clearly Novell’s main focus and they still have a few bugs to work out of this release.
Suse’s neve been a bad distro. I started running OpenSuse 10.0 a few months ago as a couple of servers for some internal use, and it performs admirably. Mainly I used it to see how good YaST was, and it is good for many things but you quickly find yourself installing something like Webmin. The graphical software management is great, and Suse has a lot of really good additional package sources – as do many distributions though, so no real advantage. Pity you have to jump through so many hoops to get repositories reliably in 10.1.
I know people say ‘don’t run a GUI on a server’, but to be able to have a GUI that you can bring up using something like NX (NoMachine) for remote management, use Konqueror for file management, set ACL and file permissions quickly and easily and edit text files quickly and easily is great for setup and testing. You can then shut your GUI down completely of course, once you’re finished. I’ve seen a new side of KDE for administering a server without the normal mundane hassle, and it’s great.
I’ve tested 10.1 in a virtual machine for a while, and to be honest, I can’t see me upgrading 10.0 for a significant amount of time – if ever. YaST was never the greatest manager of packages and repositories in the world, but Zenworks ZMD is a steaming pile of dog turd. Worse, they’re combining different package repositories as well! They’ve tried for some time to get this to work, and to be honest, I just don’t see what it’s going to offer anyone over the existing system – even their paying customers – apart from pain. The background service for something like this should be small and unobtrusive – this thing is huge.
This is a political decision – and it shows. It also shows Novell’s attitude to OpenSuse. If the quality of KDE’s fit and finish into Suse deteriorates further, then I am definitely not upgrading at all. I’ll be moving to (K)Ubuntu. All they need is a set of graphical tools, like YaST, integrated into KDE’s Control Centre for package management and other administrative tasks. Once that happens, I’m gone.
Zenworks ZMD is a steaming pile of dog turd
It’ß so slowwwww
With SuSE 10 adding repo’ß was a breeze.
segedunum,
Re: “YaST was never the greatest manager of packages and repositories in the world, but Zenworks ZMD is a steaming pile of dog turd. Worse, they’re combining different package repositories as well!”
YAST is still present on SUSE Linux for system control but what was replaced was SUSE Watcher which is where ZENworks takes over. ZENworks not only does what SUSE Watcher did before but is capable of much more to keep systems up to date. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenworks for more information.
As for combining different repositories ZENworks allows the use of not only YAST Source repositories but also YUM which are used with RHEL and Fedora Linux. The advantage being that customers will have access to a wider list of packages that they didn’t before. Since ZENworks can resolve dependencies there shouldn’t be any issues with installing from YUM repositories. After all I’ve done it successfully for the past two years by installing commercial binary RPM packages such as those for Maya (Autodesk.com) and XSI (Softimage.com) which were compiled on Red Hat, not SUSE Linux. ZENworks access to YUM repositories makes it unnecessary for customers to use APT which was not user friendly, especially for those migrating to Linux.
If you’re having difficulty with either YAST or ZENworks I suggest using Gnome. There has been several complaints filed on Novell’s Bugzilla in regards to both adding sources to YAST and ZENworks crashing while on KDE. I have not had such issues while on Gnome which may have to do with Novell focusing more on Gnome for the Enterprise line. This isn’t a bad thing as it makes business sense to focus resources on one desktop, not two which helps to speed up time completing new projects as well resolving issues. I used to complaine about Gnome in previous SUSE Linux releases but have to admit that they seem to have got Gnome right for this release. It’s also less bloat looking than KDE on SUSE Linux 10.1 with out sacrificing either functionality or applications.
Edited 2006-05-24 15:32
…. of the woodwork.
let’s hope Novel is paying attention.
SUSE has historically (since 9.1) the most polished KDE distro available, and arguably the most polished distro period available.
Novell are gambling that SUSE fans really care about the polish, and not the KDE polish.
that’s start to look like a pretty shakey gamble right now!
knetworkmanager is a Suse project to provide a true KDE front-end for Red Hat developed networkmanager, other distros settle for using the Gnome applet in KDE.
kerry was (AFAIK) a Suse project to provide a true KDE interface to Beagle giving KDE users a very useable and much needed desktop search system, particularly combined with the kio-slave.
And speaking of beagle, Suse split most of the gnome dependencies from the beagle/mono packages to make it an easier fit for KDE.
kpowersave is also a Suse project to replace the defunct klaptop utility in KDE and provide better laptop/acpi/power manageability, although it’s not new to 10.1 but it is still being maintained and improved.
The rumours of KDE’s demise at Novell are premature. That should have been apparent from their quick turnaround after the customer backlash. They still do more to invest in and build upon KDE than any other distro out there. There’d be no point in investing in KDE projects or porting/creating KDE-specific front-ends when other distros settle for mixing Gnome/GTK and KDE/Qt apps, depending on what’s available.
Novell does not care about Gnome. Unfortuantely they are stuck with a bunch of Gnome developers that scared off many (but not all) of the KDE developers, but their primary emphasis is Mono. That’s what Novell is underwriting. They don’t care if you use KDE or Gnome, as long as mono is in there. That’s why they are writing all their backends and core-apps in mono. Mono mono mono. Kmono or Gmono, doesn’t matter.
No doubt they are also hedging their bets on KDE 4.0 as well. The project seems to be finally gaining some momentum now that they’ve got the building and porting issues taken care of, and don’t forget some of the KDE devs are on Novell’s payroll.
And lastly, don’t forget that the bulk of Novell’s existing install base for Linux desktops/servers was inherited from Suse. That means the bulk of them are running KDE. They’re the ones Novell listened to when they backtracked on the pure Gnome decision. There’s also a reason why Novell Linux Desktop was renamed Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop, and not Ximian Linux Enterprise Desktop.
Still, I’ll be keeping my eye on them as 10.2 develops out… Novell is so erratic lately you can’t take anything for granted, the openSuse guys seem to be doing a decent job of rolling with the punches. And let there be no doubt, the zmd package management issues in Suse were a result of unwanted Novell interference, not a result poor decision making from the Suse devs. They’re the ones living with the abuse, though.
knetworkmanager is a Suse project to provide a true KDE front-end for Red Hat developed networkmanager, other distros settle for using the Gnome applet in KDE.
True. Work in that area has been most welcome, although I don’t think NetworkManager is the greatest bit of software to be building on.
kerry was (AFAIK) a Suse project to provide a true KDE interface to Beagle giving KDE users a very useable and much needed desktop search system, particularly combined with the kio-slave.
Considering that Beagle, along with ZMD and any other heavy Mono services, are going to be the first things to be turned off I doubt whether I’ll see the benefits.
kpowersave is also a Suse project to replace the defunct klaptop utility in KDE and provide better laptop/acpi/power manageability
True, yes. KDE’s laptop support has consisted of a multitude of disconnected modules.
They still do more to invest in and build upon KDE than any other distro out there. There’d be no point in investing in KDE projects or porting/creating KDE-specific front-ends when other distros settle for mixing Gnome/GTK and KDE/Qt apps
I wouldn’t read too much into that to be honest. Novell’s management and leadership is so weak that many parts of the company can go off and do their own thing if they apply enough pressure. Plus, because KDE is out there and being used by many customers within SLES it has to be maintained. Even Novell seem to realise that.
Unfortuantely they are stuck with a bunch of Gnome developers that scared off many (but not all) of the KDE developers, but their primary emphasis is Mono. That’s what Novell is underwriting.
Well, Mono simply implies Gnome really. The Mono thing is going to crash and burn in a hugely spectacular way. I don’t think anyone at Novell realises the development effort and resources that needs to go into developing a whole, VM based no less, programming framework and environment and making it good enough for their front-line software to use – and that’s apart from providing support for .Net compatibility and Windows specifics. Along with some of the other things that are going on at Novell, this will simply speed up the demise further.
You’ve also got people on the purely Novell side of the company, Netware engineers and alike, who want absolutely nothing to do with KDE, Gnome, Mono or even Linux. Lovely.
There’s also a reason why Novell Linux Desktop was renamed Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop, and not Ximian Linux Enterprise Desktop.
A symbolic name change has to be followed through.
And let there be no doubt, the zmd package management issues in Suse were a result of unwanted Novell interference, not a result poor decision making from the Suse devs. They’re the ones living with the abuse, though.
Well, I think absolutely everybody can see where the interference came from, and I certainly don’t blame Suse’s developers. They had a working system. Very few people will be blaming the Suse people, and those that do will be largely uninformed.
Edited 2006-05-23 22:18