Review: openSUSE 11.4 KDE

Main Screen + Kickoff

This review you are about to read was originally going to be about Scientific Linux 6. However, two things changed that: one, openSUSE 11.4 got released yesterday, though I did think about doing Scientific Linux today and openSUSE in a few days, and two, Scientific Linux didn't play well with either UnetBootin or MultiSystem. In any case, that review will have to wait a bit.

openSUSE is the free end user-grade version of SUSE, the other version being Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (Novell SLED). It has been a pioneer and a force for progress in the Linux ecosystem; unfortunately, Novell has been beleaguered by financial troubles and is going to be bought out by Attachmate, though the openSUSE developers have remained committed to the project regardless of Novell's fate. Though openSUSE is primarily a KDE desktop, the developers have made almost equal contributions to both GNOME and KDE. For example, the openSUSE developers were the ones who created the Kickoff menu for KDE 4 as well as the ones who led the charge for better integration of Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice.org into KDE 4. They were also instrumental in developing the Slab menu (which inspired and has been improved upon by the Mint Menu), Banshee and other Mono-based applications, and other things like Bonobo that aren't directly noticed by users. I was actually thinking of testing both the GNOME and KDE versions, but I figured that testing the GNOME version would be just testing the existing applications in a more familiar GNOME environment, so I might as well just test the KDE version; plus, I got lazy when downloading the ISO files. Oh well.

I have tried openSUSE twice before, both times version 11.3 KDE. The first time I tried it was in a virtual machine and as part of a comparison with other KDE distributions, and I was fairly pleased with its stability; that said, it was quite slow, though that could be attributable to the limited settings in the virtual machine due to the limited resources of my old computer. The second time I tried it was just to see if it would play well with my hardware on a live USB; unfortunately, the system still felt slow even on my newer current computer, and Skype refused to start once downloaded and installed. Follow the jump to see how openSUSE 11.4 compares to 11.3. I tested openSUSE 11.4 KDE by adding it to my current multiboot live USB setup using MultiSystem, but I did not test the installation procedure.

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