TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

SuSE was the darling of Rig 2 back in the 9.x days. I could go to Fry's Electronics and buy a retail box and know that when I got home, I'd have a fully-functional system that worked offline.

My love for SuSE has waned significantly in recent years with the advent of the 10.x versions. It is my fervent hope that someday, a new version of SuSE will come out that will grab me as much as the 9.x series did.

I was interested to see how SuSE handled KDE 4 (given my less than stellar experience in Fedora 9), so I started with the KDE flavor LiveCD. Out of equal amounts of "wanting to be fair" and "good old-fashioned frustration" I also ran the Gnome LiveCD and the full DVD, which I'll note here. Fair warning: this is a long one.

NOTE: The DVD section was done in my VirtualBox virtual machine only, as I'm in the process of moving right now and I don't have access to Rig 2. As soon as I'm done moving and get set up again, I will update the rant.

Install (KDE4):

Usually when an installer starts with an End-User License Agreement (EULA) I get excited. In some cases this means it comes with something a more conservative distro wouldn't include, such as multimedia support or a Flash player. As I found out later, neither of these is included, so I'm not sure what software SuSE includes that has a non-GPL license.

The YaST installer hasn't really changed much in recent years, so I won't give you a play by play on that.

On the screen where I created my regular user I noticed that the default option was to make my password the administrator password and auto-login my user. This is no doubt to imitate the default settings on Microsoft Windows, and it's a very serious security risk.

Reboot took me straight into the first boot configuration screen, which did a lot of detecting before dumping me on the desktop. I have to say that the menu graphics during the install of OpenSuSE 11 are some of the most professional looking I've seen in recent months.

I noticed something right away. Those icons on the desktop? They're actually not icons, but widgets. I remember reading that in KDE 4 the developers had essentially done away with the "desktop" with "icons," instead making everything a widget on top of their windowing layer.

I was worried, but I'm glad to see SuSE came up with a way around it. Now if I could just figure out how to not see those frames around the icons when I mouse over them. Oh, well, scratch that. Apparently if I "lock" the widgets I don't see the little frames.

That's not to say the user interface didn't have other annoyances. The applications menu uses the "interactive tabs" approach that I've seen in SuSE Linux Enterprise (SLED) before. I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. It just gets in my way.

While trying to figure out how to get a traditional applications menu, I made a mistake. I ended up removing the bottom panel entirely. This actually helped me figure out a bit more about the way KDE4 works.

First, I needed another panel, so I added one. I moved it to the bottom of the screen. I then needed an applications menu, so I added that as well, but I picked the "traditional" option.

Finally, I had the apps menu I wanted. Next I added a clock, a workspace switcher (pager), and a task manager. At this point KDE crashed on me. I tried again. This time it took, and I had successfully recreated the panel.

After doing all that, I discovered that I could have given myself a regular applications menu with this little gem. Oh well, live and learn.

Deleting a file on my desktop was much more difficult in KDE4. The trash widget doesn't work as a drag-and-drop mechanism, which makes me wonder why it's there at all. I had to right click and hit "remove this icon," which asked me if I wanted to delete it.

There is a serious bug with this dialog. Regardless of what you choose, the icon gets deleted. I wasn't sure at first so I hit "Cancel." KDE still deleted it. The same is true if you just X out of the dialog. The default behavior for a confirmation dialog should NEVER be destructive.

Someone at work informed me that if you don't choose "OK" to delete the icon, it will show up again if you log out and then back in. Apparently this is a known bug that will hopefully be fixed in 4.1.

YaST detected my wireless card but gave me no option to install dirvers for it. Ndiswrapper was not installed.

I stopped here and decided to install the Gnome version instead. On my way out, I was amused with the "LEAVE" menu. Not "logout," or even "quit" would have sufficed. Instead we get what sounds like a command from my computer.

Install (Gnome):

The YaST installer for the Gnome version looked the same, but different. Everything had a more GTK feel to it. It reminded me more of Ubuntu. I can't say that was necessarily a bad thing. Although the screens looked different, I was presented with precisely the same choices, including the auto-login regular user.

The default desktop reminds me of Linux Mint. The applications menu is no less obnoxious than the one in KDE, and harder to fix. Rather than just choosing an option in a right-click menu, I had to remove the application menu applet and add the traditional menu, which is what I was trying to do in KDE4 when I deleted the panel.

Unfortunately, even that wasn't what I wanted. The application arrangement in the "traditional" main menu was terrible. If there's just one application for a task, why the hell would you put it in its own menu?

The obvious answer is "to make the regular menu annoying and force you to use their "slab" menu instead. With some work I could edit the traditional menu to my liking, but I just wasn't in the mood.

Install (DVD):

After hearing a glowing report from a coworker who installed from the DVD image rather than the LiveCDs, I decided to give the DVD a try. For the purposes of this rant I installed KDE 4, KDE 3.5, and Gnome 2.22. I was given the choice of just one during the install process, but I added the others later.

The DVD installer used the same theme as the first boot configuration on the LiveCDs, and I must say I found it much more pleasant to look at. The installer itself reminded me more of what I was used to from a SuSE install.

Once I rebooted I fired up YaST with the intention of seeing what all I could add from the DVD using it as a repository. This is a strength I enjoyed in my 9.x days. First up was GCC (so I could install Nvidia drivers).

There's a feature in YaST that I've never noticed before called "patterns." That's not to say it's necessarily new, just that I've never noticed it. They're basically high-level metapackages that let you select a subset of software for a particular purpose. In my case, C/C++ development.

I also took the opportunity to install KDE 4 and Gnome. All this ended up being a little over a gigabyte of stuff. Ah, the wonders of DVDs.

Flash was installed, as was MP3 support. *This* is what I expected when I saw the EULAs for the LiveCDs.

Software Selection (KDE):

Firefox and OpenOffice were present. I was annoyed (but not surprised) that Pidgin and GIMP were missing. Why is it that distribution maintainers assume that if someone wants to run KDE or Gnome that they only want to run applications specifically designed for that desktop? Kopete is cute and all, but I'm just more accustomed to Pidgin.

I can chalk up the choice of Kopete over Pidgin to a difference in taste. However, replacing GIMP with OpenOffice Draw? That's simply unforgivable.

Neither GCC nor Java were installed, as far as I could tell. This grounds me on Rig 2 with no 3D drivers and no way to do my work, save adding a JVM myself from a CD. MP3 support was also not present.

Software Selection (Gnome):

Firefox, OpenOffice and Pidgin were installed. So far so good. However, I was just as shocked as this little guy to find that even in the GNOME version of OpenSuSE, GIMP was replaced by OpenOffice Draw.

What kind of bizarro world do these developers live in? I understand that space on a CD is limited, but you include applications like Cheese and F-Spot (both useless to me) and leave out GIMP?

Once again, I had no Java or GCC, therefore I had no 3D drivers or work ability. MP3 support was also still missing. Are they purposefully making the free CDs worthless so that you'll just give up and buy a retail boxed set? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Software Selection (DVD):

Obviously, I expected there to be a lot more software available on the DVD. Digging through YaST after the install, I was not disappointed.

During the "slide show" while the DVD was installing, I noticed that the GIMP was mentioned. I of course had to confirm that. As you can see, it was there.

Interestingly, although GCC wasn't installed by default, Java was. As I mentioned before, I was able to get GCC off the DVD.

I'm not entirely sure what comes on the default DVD install of Gnome or KDE 4, since I installed them both on top of KDE 3.5. In this case it's pretty much irrelevant to me; if it's available on the DVD, it's available to Rig 2.

I do know that once I installed Gnome, Pidgin showed up. Firefox and OpenOffice were included in the original KDE 3.5 install.

Conclusion (LiveCDs):

If anything has been made crystal clear to me, it's that KDE 4 is definitely not ready. I don't like getting surprised with files getting deleted and random crashes by key functionality (like the add/remove widgets ability). If I were in the mood for KDE, I would go with 3.5 for the foreseeable future.

Stability aside, KDE 4 is still an interesting visual experiment and I hope that it gets much more stable very soon. I also hope that no more major distributions will make the same mistake of including what amounts to a beta build of a desktop in their gold master release. That last hope might well be in vain.

I thought perhaps running the Gnome version would help my overall opinion. Although the Gnome desktop in its current version is leaps and bounds more stable than KDE 4, it did nothing to help the software choices made by OpenSuSE's maintainers.

Conclusion (DVD):

The DVD was significantly better than either LiveCD for my purposes. Perhaps it's just because there's more space for them to put pretty much everything on there and let me pick and choose what I need after the fact. The very concept of being able to use the DVD as an offline repository puts SuSE far ahead of Fedora in my opinion.

Most of my annoyances with the LiveCDs revolved around bad default software choices. The DVD made this moot, since I could add on what I wanted after the fact. There's still the very strange default application menus, though.

Someone at work who was used to Windows Vista told me that the default menus in SuSE make sense to him. That says a lot to me, and not in a good way.

If SuSE is actively trying to make Vista converts feel comfortable (at the expense of everyone else), they're catering to a different demographic than me. When that sort of thing happens, I look elsewhere.

Visual gripes aside I had a solid experience with OpenSuSE 11, when I installed it from the DVD. It's not quite something I'd pay $60USD for, but it would let me do what I needed on Rig 2 in a pinch.