openSUSE? Tempting...

[tuxerman]

Well I'm in a dilemma right now. I know Kubuntu is almost the worst (if not THE worst) KDE distro.. so I want to switch to openSUSE. But I simply can't afford to miss two things:
1: The community support ubuntu (and subsequently, Kubuntu and others too) has.. I simply love this place and the people here;
and 2: 'apt'. I've heard good things about the 1-click install and zypper in openSUSE 11, and want to give it a try, but I'd like to hear from someone who has used them. Download speeds here arent very impressive and I'll like to have a fairly good opinion before I go ahead

For the record, I'm a KDE user, have tried to be content with ubuntu but find myself going back to KDE. Have even tried doing a KDE-install on top of ubuntu but even that isn't really good, not considering the clutter.

I have used openSUSE when it was in version 10 and found it to be real good except for package management, which has hopefully changed. But again this community has a soft spot in my heart

[Vince4Amy]

OpenSUSE Is a brilliant distro. 11.1 is out on the 18th if you want to wait for the latest and greatest. The DVD will contain:

Gnome 2.24
KDE 3.5.10
KDE 4.1

I'm downloading the release candidate right now.

I've been using SuSE since 9.1 and I've always found it to be a nice easy to use stable system. I've never understood why some people don't like YaST I've never had problems with speed (especially in 11 it's really fast). I guess the download speeds you were talking about were simply a poor connection.

RPM Distros are fine as well, I've never had dependency problems not even back on 9.1. OpenSUSE Is also very stable and don't let the Novell haters tell you not to use it.

[tuxerman]

What if I go for the KDE4 live CD version (of the 11.1 release)? I think it's better because I dont need to be downloading 5 gigs-worth of stuff of which only a fraction is needed for my everyday use. (Thats one of the things I just love about *ubuntu - it installs the basics and I can just apt-get anything I need)... so what all packages will the KDE4 live CD (11.1) include? Or what has the older KDE4 one included?
Thanks,

[Vince4Amy]

The Live CD includes everything to have a working base system KDE, Firefox, OpenOffice etc and you'd download extra packages from the repositories, a lot like Kubuntu.

YaST should automatically download packages required when it comes to configuring a printer or similar hardware through it.

[exploder]

tuxerman, there is nothing wrong with being a KDE fan. I have tried OpenSuse quite a few times but have found their repos to be somewhat frustrating when it comes to adding the multimedia packages.

Kubuntu is not perfect by any means but it has much better support from the community. There is the "How To" for getting multimedia working, copy and paste a command and everything works! Also, there are people in the forums that can help you to easily upgrade KDE to newer development versions.

Just one more thought, all of the new releases seem to suffer from the exact same bugs. I think you will find much better support right here. I compare lots of distros and while OpenSuse looks attractive the underlying system is still the same as any other distribution.

Just my two cents.

[binbash]

zypper is also good, not good as apt but it is ok.things i dont like at suse :

It does not have active community like ubuntu.You will miss that
I dont like repos (community repos, everything)
I tried Latest suse, and i think kubuntu is better than opensuse as kde distro.Even fedora 10 is better than suse

[exploder]

To add to what binbash wrote, at least Fedora has community built scripts to get your multimedia working. OpenSuse's repos always seem to have conflicting packages for me and poor support where multimedia is concerned.

[kabloink]

I don't understand why so many people have problems with the multimedia codecs on OpenSUSE. The restricted codecs for multimedia are quickly and easily installed by using the one click installs at the OpenSUSE Community website.

http://opensuse-community.org/

[kabloink]

The restricted formats for multimedia are quickly and easily installed by using the one click installs at the OpenSUSE Community website. So, the multimedia support shouldn't be a problem

http://opensuse-community.org/

The only multimedia conflict that I noticed on OpenSUSE 11 is with the bad codecs for gstreamer. You are given the choice on how to proceed when this happens. It's no different than trying to install debs from another source on Ubuntu and getting an error message about conflicts.

[exploder]

The restricted formats for multimedia are quickly and easily installed by using the one click installs at the OpenSUSE Community website. So, the multimedia support shouldn't be a problem

I tried that in OpenSuse 11 and the system would not boot up right after that. It might have been something I did wrong but after reinstalling the OS twice I had enough.

I will no doubt try OpenSuse 11.1 on my test machine and I am glad you posted the one click multimedia install for anyone wishing to give it a try.