How good is Open SuSE ?

[agray]

As far as distro's go, opensuse11 is really nice. I think ubuntu is probably a bit easier to use as far as a desktop goes, but opensuse has great support for both kde and gnome, but yeah, different stokes for different folks.

[RS3York]

I find that apt's
{apt install routine - snipped for size}

is slower than
{libzypp install routine - snipped for size}

Where it only reads the database once

I shouldn't have said it can kill apt, but this is how I see things
Zypper > APT
YaST < Synaptic
PackageKit with Zypp backend > PackageKit with APT backend

However, Zypper seems to be smarter than both YaST and PackageKit even though they all use libzypp...

And I find Synaptic to be smarter than APT in most cases.

Yes, I agree Zypper is more efficient. It will read the database once, and it also automatically checks that you have the most up-to-date repo data.

So where in Apt you must run

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
OR 
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

With Zypper you can run just

zypper up -t package

But I think apt only reads the database twice. Once in the beginning and again after the downloads are finished, I could be mistaken.

I don't find zypper to be smarter than YaST, nor Synaptic smarter than apt. But YaST does slow the process down a bit since it will run the SUSEconfig routine afterwards. Haven't used PackageKit, so I can't comment on it much, but it makes sense that it would be as fast as the backend it utilizes. In any event, people shouldn't shy away from openSUSE because of it's package management anymore.

But to the thread question itself: How good is openSUSE? Very Good!!

[mikjp]

OpenSUSE's package management got a lot faster in 11.0. In addition, KDE4 is almost usable in openSUSE, in other words, it is a lot better than any other version of KDE4 I've tried during the last months.

Greetings,

mikko

[some-guy]

OpenSUSE's package management got a lot faster in 11.0. In addition, KDE4 is almost usable in openSUSE, in other words, it is a lot better than any other version of KDE4 I've tried during the last months.

Greetings,

mikko

It's a hybrid, many enhancements and fixes from 4.1 were backported