So it has been a while...
Time to do it again so I downloaded the Netinstall and ran it. There I get good information of Gnome and KDE that are the obvious choices in the installer. I clearly do not want all that bloat so I went for the smaller print and chose Xfce4.
This is a sensible way of doing it though - the newbies will only get confused by all the other options - having just learned about the existence of KDE and Gnome.
So no complaints there.
OpenSuse does clearly aspire to an "working out of the box" distro. And even with the netinstall I simply went for the "Enter strategy" - I kept pressing enter until the download started!
I provided my name and password and let OpenSUse do the rest.
That worked just fine.
The Netinstall downloaded a lot of stuff needed to give newbies a good first experience - nothing wrong with that, you do not pick OpenSuse if you want a minimalistic distro.
(Or you could alter it to be slim and even fit on rescueCD's as we have done in Susestudio )
So the Netinstall takes its time but all goes well - and after a while it was time to reboot.
Opensuse is still the "Looker" it has always been. My "enter" setup made me log in automatically so I was ready to go.
The Font rendering in Firefox was crisp and clear and the Xfce4 panel was nicely placed at the bottom.
The menu was simple and just fine but I decided to also install the whisker menu that has more options and search function.
To my surprise the Whisker meny was in the repos so I could simply install it from the program manager
One nice thing about Yast is that the Groups on the left get narrowed down as you type your search - makes things clean.
OpenSuse has always been a nightmare to me because I have often felt that every program has its own repo, so this was a pleasant surprise.
Bubbling with optimism I went for Inxi ... and .. nothing. So time to do the mandatory Suse Googling again:
I found this site:
http://software.opensuse.org/download.h ... ckage=inxi
and here I could click the Suse icon and it provided me with a file that made Yast auto-install it and add the utilities repo. Lots of warnings and accepting of keys later; I had inxi installed.
This is what I do not like about Opensuse! If you get a lot of Windows like warnings then you will start ignoring them or check "alway accept".
The warnings do serve the purpose of keeping Suses back free, more than they do help me.
And I still am no fan of the Opensuse repo policy - it defies the Opensuse aspiration to be useful to newbies.
Here is the repo overview
To find out in what repo Inxi is you should be able to find it here:
http://software.opensuse.org/package/in ... _term=inxi
But I did not find anything for Opensuse 13.1 there. So Googling it is...
I decided to test Zypper the equivalent to Pacman, Yum, and Apt-Get
Code: Select all
sudo zypper dup
... and to my surprise there were lots and lots of updates - after a Netinstall!
Oh well; the good thing was that sudo was installed and working after my newbie "enter" install.
Opensuse does present a fully fledged and usable desktop right after install - that is Newbie friendly. The Xfce desktop I chose is beautiful and fully functional.
Libreoffice,Thunderbird and Gimp are there and so are some proprietary drivers to make the experience good. Flash was not installed but was easily found and installed with the program manager.
OpenSuse does have a control panel that will help you in controlling the system.
But.....
I think others have better control panels and I kind of find OpenSUSE..boring. This may well be because I never have taken the time to use it over a longer period of time.
Opensuse does have a great catch because it looks so good, but from there I still find that it does not quite "keep what it promises".
So once again I could not resist that great looking distro ... and once again... I am not all that thrilled.
Suse has some exiting things going on with IBM and MariaDB so it is a distro that cannot be ignored.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/sus ... e-big-data
As such Novell/Suse are clearly a main competitor for RedHat.
If I should choose between Centos and OpenSuse It would be close but I prefer Centos simply because Yum understands me better than Zypper, but I guess Opensuse is better than Centos for a newbie.