Personal Bytes

Introduction

I’m a GNU/Linux user since 1998 and I’ve used a lot of distributions. I started with Redhat 5.1, went through Mandrake, a little bit on Slackware and since three years ago I’ve stick with SuSE.

My experience with SuSE started with release 8.2 which was a marvelous approach to a stable desktop experience. It was fast, almost flawless, tightly integrated and updated. Since then, I’ve continuous and religiously updated from 8.2 to 9.x and now was the time to give a try at version 10. Novell has decided to let go SuSE, like Redhat did, and delivered OpenSuSE for the community to help building it out.

Back to my first days of GNU/Linux, I also was constantly changing my desktop environment. I tried blackbox, windowmaker, enlightment, xvwm, xfce. gnome etc.. But after trying KDE I never looked back. By that time, KDE was on its first version, branch 1.x, but it was already a different experience, far from the others I’ve tried.

This time, instead of testing out a fresh SuSE install with KDE, I chose Gnome. This review is intended to review SuSE by comparing it to the older releases to see what got better (and worst) but I’ll also give a comment about Gnome, which clearly has improved a lot since the last time I used it.

OpenSuSE 10.0 Beta 4 vs SuSE 9.3

For those rambling about an unfair comparative – a beta vs a finished product – let me tell you that you would be right if I were doing a deep and overall testing. Not at all. I pretend to keep it simple so I’ll just point what got better.

Let’s start from the beginning. Installation. This procedure is exactly the same as before so I don’t have anything to point out. YaST does his job, does the necessary questions, partitions the hard drive (without messing with Windows..) and deploys everything. After half an hour and 5 CD’s inserted, you have your system installed.

After installing the system, you start it by booting. Boot has definitely improved since SuSE 9.3. It took ages to have an operational desktop environment, being it Gnome or KDE. What has changed? No more timeouts when trying to get the network on line and services are started in parallel instead of sequential. [For further information about parallelized startup, read this.

As I stated before, I’ve decided to give Gnome 2.11.95 (almost 2.12) a try. After booting, here’s the first impression.

One of the first things you’ll notice even if you don’t know how a typical Gnome desktop looks like, it’s a small icon on the top of the screen that looks like a magnifying glass. Yes, some of you may even be wondering how similar it is comparing to Spotlight — Mac OS X’s search tool. It’s Beagle! Beagle is a search tool that, like Spotlight, Google Desktop Search, etc.., indexes all your hard drive so searching becomes spontaneous.

Beagle is developed using Mono – a .NET framework for GNU/Linux — which is sponsored/belongs to Novell. So this is no surprise that Novell would include it on their distro. And it’s quite good. Despite of not being so well integrated as Spotlight (Spotlight indexes *everything*, like applications), it does a nice job when you’re looking for a mail, a chat log or simply document. Both lack a very important feature: index remote file systems on demand so it can include them on the search paths.

I took a look at OpenOffice.org 2 (still beta) and I may say that it looks more integrated than before. Icons are similar with those that ship with Gnome and it is very stable. The version that came with SuSE 9.3 was quite unstable (which is easily explained since the beta version of OO.org 2 has matured a lot). Oh, and it startup is much faster.

The usual applications that I use – Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.. — come in the latest versions available. They seem stable and as long as I used them they never had any glitch. They are also well integrated (no wonder, they use GTK!) with Gnome.

Another useful tool is a RSS/Atom feed reader. I had never used Blam before but it seemed OK and I don’t have anything to complain about. It’s like Akregator and does his job. Point.

Gnome 2.11.95 vs KDE 3.4.2

Now it’s time for another religious fight of Gnome versus KDE. The reason I decided to give Gnome a try (and from now on, use it on a daily basis) is that KDE is getting too much bloated. It has lots of features and applications, that’s true, but most of them are quite incomplete and/or buggy. Another thing that made me complain of KDE is its lack of responsiveness. I mean, when you try to open Konqueror or any other app that isn’t on cache it takes AGES – and I really mean it – to open. This became quite visible when I had Gnome and KDE side by side and KDE was sitting on a much more powerful desktop. Overall, Gnome looked more smooth.

After stating about my complains with KDE, let’s move on. So, what made me use KDE for such a long time? Its applications. Am I contradicting myself? Not quite. There some applications which have plenty of quality. I’m talking about Kate, Quanta, K3B, amaroK, ark, etc.. How did I manage to find its equivalents? Surprisingly, I didn’t [have to]. They run fast as hell on Gnome. Actually, I perceived (and I mean I) that they opened faster than in KDE! Well, it didn’t open the first time I launched it since it has to load a lot of KDE dependencies, but it was faster the second time and following. Plus, its look isn’t much different from Gnome’s default theme.

Unfortunately, not everything is perfect. I downloaded a small movie (.avi) and just double-clicked to see what Gnome would do. It opened the default movie/song player, Totem, but instead of complaining that it doesn’t have codecs to decode the movie, it simply crashed. I don’t mind since I have Mplayer, but if Totem is not ready for the prime time, it shouldn’t be included yet.

Finally, I gave Gaim a try (I used AMSN and Kopete) and it has improved a lot. It is simple but powerful (after all, Adium X is powered by libgaim, so it couldn’t be otherwise) and since AMSN has stagnated (they froze on version 0.94 for almost 1 year now) I recommend Gaim. It is built upon GTK so it looks better on the desktop than AMSN (which makes use of Tcl/Tk) does.

Final Words

Although my choice about Gnome is completely personal, it’s factual and non deniable that SuSE has improved a lot. If you really like SuSE and need YaST, then OpenSuSE 10.0 is for you. YaST can be very handy if you’re trying to set something you’ve never tried before. It’s a good approach for a newbie. Recommended the update.