I’ve tried a lot of Linux distros. U/Ku/Xubuntu, Fedora, Debian (Etch), SimplyMEPIS, and dyne:bolic are a couple that I’ve tried. I’ve also tried OpenSUSE, which is the Linux distribution that fits me best. This article is about my experience with OpenSUSE 11 Release Candidate 1.

1) Installation

Installation went fine. It was similar to the OpenSUSE 10.3 installer, with a few exceptions. One that interests me is the screenshot below.

Notice the “Use this password for system administrator” button? You should have. I mean, it’s circled in red! Anyway, I think that it’s OpenSUSE trying to more of an Ubuntu-like experience as Ubuntu uses sudo. For those of you that don’t know, sudo allows a sudo-capable user to use their own password to get root access.

Continuing on the track of passwords, the OpenSUSE 11 actually criticized my root password (I didn’t check the “Use this password for system administrator” box, if that’s what your thinking).

2) User interface

The user interface is much better. The loading and login screens have been reworked, but still center around the green OpenSUSE color scheme. OpenSUSE KDE comes with KDE 4.0.4, which made me a little nervous at first. This is actually the first time that I’ve been able to use KDE 4.0.x without something going horribly wrong.

3) YaST2

It’s still slow, but you’ll find that the package manager interface is a lot cleaner. You don’t get a new dialog box every millisecond, keeps your taskbar happy.

However, the package manager interface isn’t completely happy there. All the repositories were disabled, so I had to enable them through YaST2.

UPDATE: A few days later, I had hundreds of security updates to install, and had multiple difficulties installing them. YaST2 loses points in this section.

4) Hardware support

My hardware is supported more or less the same, and I didn’t have the opportunity to compare the hardware support of OpenSUSE 10.3 and OpenSUSE 11 on a bunch of different computers, so I can only give you my personal experience.

It supports most of my hardware just fine, except for my wi-fi card, which works fine in Ubuntu and Fedora. Since I tested OpenSUSE 11 on a desktop with a wired Internet connection, the wi-fi issues don’t actually matter.

After this testing, I decided to relax with some BZFlag. Wait! I don’t have 3D by default. I’ll need to install the Nvidia driver. You can see where this story is going.

I’ve had success with the Nvidia driver on my hardware with OpenSUSE 10.3, so I thought I’d be okay in this area. Apparently not. After my computer fell back to the terminal, I replaced the xorg.conf with a backup before the installation of the driver, and now I’m okay. I still don’t have 3D, but I think that I’ll just have to go without that for now.

UPDATE: I was being silly and didn’t load the kernel module or reboot when I tried it.

Conclusion

OpenSUSE is a Linux distribution that I love and OpenSUSE 11 gave me several more reasons to love it, despite some minor hiccups.