On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 11:04 PM, Low Kian Seong
Right off the bat, let me just say this is not meant to end up as a flame bait. I am currently just at a crossroad as whether to install fedora 10 or opensuse 11.1 on my laptop and I am at a loss as both of them seems to be equally matched. Can the people of the opensuse mailing just tell me one or two reasons why you prefer opensuse compared to Fedora?
I usually recommend that people try both, since there's no cost to you
(except for a bit of time) to test each distro out. Yes, I have a
preference (um, yes, openSUSE) -- but Linux is very much about choice,
and I'm a big fan of informed choice.
Some of the things I think that make openSUSE unique:
* YaST -- most comprehensive system management tool for Linux.
* Zypper -- very fast package management, a great RPM front-end and
easy to use. I much prefer Zypper to Yum.
* KDE -- if you're a KDE user, I think you'll find that openSUSE's KDE
distribution is extremely well-polished, whether you're using KDE 3.5
or 4.1x (or the 4.2 packages we released last week.)
* GNOME -- if you're a GNOME user, I think you'll find that our GNOME
rocks as well. We have a really well-polished GNOME distribution, and
a growing and awesome GNOME community as well.
* openSUSE Education -- http://en.opensuse.org/Education Great project
for supporting Linux in schools around openSUSE.
* openSUSE Build Service -- you can often find many of the very latest
releases (like KDE 4.2 or GNOME Do 0.8) nearly as soon as they're
released and sometimes even simultaneously with the official upstream
release. I make pretty heavy use of the build service to add stuff
like Gwibber and the latest KDE to my systems rather than waiting for
them to be in the next release of openSUSE. Note that this *may* apply
to Fedora or other distros as well if the packagers decide to support
those distros in the build service too -- since our build service is
capable of building packages for multiple distros, not just
suse-based.
Just a few of the reasons I really enjoy openSUSE -- and I think you'd
agree. But, the best thing for you may be to install both and try each
release out for a week or two before deciding.
Best of luck, and have a lot of fun!
Zonker
--
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier