Anyone on 10.3?

[Incense]

I downloaded and installed the RC1 of 10.3, and to be honest, I'm really not too impressed. Package Managment through YaST feels worse then it did before, and overall it just feels less polished then 10.2 did. I've been a SUSE user for years, and I don't know if Novell is just leaving a bad taste, or what is going on, but Kubuntu 7.10 is looking pretty nice right about now. Anyone else feeling the same way?

[santiagoward2000]

I downloaded and installed the RC1 of 10.3, and to be honest, I'm really not too impressed. Package Managment through YaST feels worse then it did before, and overall it just feels less polished then 10.2 did. I've been a SUSE user for years, and I don't know if Novell is just leaving a bad taste, or what is going on, but Kubuntu 7.10 is looking pretty nice right about now. Anyone else feeling the same way?

Hey, sorry man, but... 10.3? What distro are you talking about? SUSE?

[Incense]

Hey, sorry man, but... 10.3? What distro are you talking about? SUSE?

Yeah OpenSUSE 10.3 Sorry, thought I put it in the OpenSUSE section.

[igknighted]

Really? I thought 10.3 was the best in a long time. Yast was great, it automatically added all the community repos I wanted (atheros, pacman, etc.), and was much faster than 10.1/10.2. The GUI version didn't seem to want to use the YUM repos, but using zypper via the CLI (which is so much better anyways) worked perfectly.

I thought the green was a welcome change from the drab blue that we have had the past few releases. Also the desktop just felt a little more responsive (although suse is always one of the least responsive distro's for me, unfortunately).

I still prefer Mandriva and Fedora over it, but Suse 10.3 is a great release, and I'll keep my eye on it in the future.

[sstusick]

I haven't had good luck with SuSE...used 10.2 for 5 months...and it was one headache after the other. Crashing, YaST was slow, system slowness in general...an overrated distro, IMO. I finally gave up and went back to Windows for a couple months before trying Ubuntu and everything worked fine with NO issues and had the speed to boot.

[santiagoward2000]

Actually, I'm pretty new in Linux, and haven't tried any distro apart from the Ubuntu family. How is it?

[theonlyrealperson]

I'm on 10.3, and there are definitely pluses and minuses.

Pluses:
1. Yast seems a LOT faster. It's still not quick - not by a longshot - but it is much faster than the glacial 10.2.
2. Color scheme is much better.
3. Being able to add in repos without searching the net. Nice...
4. ONE DISK. Very nice. Still downloads a couple of gig during the install though.

Minuses:
1. I know it's a release candidate, but it doesn't seem as solid as 10.2. I don't know if it's 10.2 vs. 10.3 or Gnome vs. KDE though. I've crashed a couple of times, the window manager will lose my USB drives, X11 never configures my resolution correctly after every reboot, etc. I moved from Gnome 10.2 to KDE 10.3, so I don't know if it's a version or manager deal...
2. Compiz-Fusion worked flawlessly in 10.2. Can't even get the sucker to install correctly in 10.3. Even with the 1-Click installer.
3. Still a HUGE distro, comparatively. Need lots of / space.

I'm actually thinking of going back to 10.2 until a couple of months after 10.3 goes final. I don't know...

[tehhaxorr]

I'm on 10.3, and there are definitely pluses and minuses.

Pluses:
1. Yast seems a LOT faster. It's still not quick - not by a longshot - but it is much faster than the glacial 10.2.
2. Color scheme is much better.
3. Being able to add in repos without searching the net. Nice...
4. ONE DISK. Very nice. Still downloads a couple of gig during the install though.

Minuses:
1. I know it's a release candidate, but it doesn't seem as solid as 10.2. I don't know if it's 10.2 vs. 10.3 or Gnome vs. KDE though. I've crashed a couple of times, the window manager will lose my USB drives, X11 never configures my resolution correctly after every reboot, etc. I moved from Gnome 10.2 to KDE 10.3, so I don't know if it's a version or manager deal...
2. Compiz-Fusion worked flawlessly in 10.2. Can't even get the sucker to install correctly in 10.3. Even with the 1-Click installer.
3. Still a HUGE distro, comparatively. Need lots of / space.

I'm actually thinking of going back to 10.2 until a couple of months after 10.3 goes final. I don't know...

Did you report the bugs?

http://en.opensuse.org/Submit_a_Bug

No use complaining if you aren't prepared to tell them what's wrong.

[LuisAugusto]

I'm using OpenSUSE 10.3

Overall, it's one (if not) the best distro I have ever use.
It's fast, it can be install with one CD (finally), BuildService is great, it have the best configuration tool ever made (YaST), it has a nice desktop by default (both KDE and GNOME versions), it only down it's possibly that package management is a little slow, BECAUSE IT REFRESH EVERY DAMN TIME THE REPOS (I can't understand why it behavior that way).

It feels very polished, and pro, it doesn't feel like a toy or a distro to play around some days (I love elive and e17, but, don't they give you that feeling?)

[Erunno]

I've been using the GNOME flavour of 10.3 since RC1 since I was curious about the current state of GNOME (can't participate in flame wars when I completely don't know what I'm talking about ). Some random impressions and obersavations:

GRUB cannot be installed on a XFS partition and this is not fixable with an online update since they are applied after the basic installation. I'm hoping that this is fixed on the gold master.

There are still some bugs left on my installation: Totem and Banshee don't work due to some GStreamer bug. The updater applet hangs after successfully installung updates (it just freezes).

The new unified look of the application browser, the control center and Yast gives the desktop a very coherent look.

You can easily add additional repositories right via the Yast module "Community repositories" although the selection is a bit strange (KDE4 for instance is missing).

Yast is a LOT faster than in 10.3. On the other hand, it's nigh to impossible that it could be any slower. It still refreshes the repositories each time you start it but from what I've read you can tweak this behaviour by increasing the intervall between refreshes.

I really like SLAB. Like Kickoff once I added my favourite applications to the favourite list I rarely visited the application browser. What I miss from Kickoff is the inline output of search results, SLAB opens a separate window for that.

I really don't like the new GNOME frontend to the Yast software management. It feels cramped and has some real shortcomings: It's slow (switching between different views takes too long), it feels very cramped and it doesn't show which dependencies will be installed until you hit the accept button (which forces me into a "Accept / Cancel" loop in order to check the dependencies). There are also some up and down arrows and it's not obvious to me what they do.

There's no way to see which package upgrades will be installed via the GUI. Even the details view only shows which (incremental) updates will be installed, not new package versions. You'll have to check the logs or use the CLI tool.

Adding the online repositories before the installations results in Yast adding about a GB of additional packages without asking the user first. Not adding the repositories will result in a non-localized (not translated) desktop with no obvious way to fixing this except looking for the translation packages yourself. Pick your poison.

Virtuals desktop functionality is disabled on the GNOME desktop, meaning that they use only one desktop and removed the applet for switching. I'm curious why this was done.

Verdict: Very good release with some bugs left to iron out and some questionable design decisions. The GNOME implementation is excellent, and that is coming from a KDE user.