OpenSUSE 11.4 Released

MasterPatricko writes with good news from SUSE: "'We are proud to announce the launch of 11.4 in the openSUSE tradition of delivering the latest technology while maintaining stability. The 11.4 release brings significant improvements along with the latest in Free Software applications. Combined with the appearance of new tools, projects and services around the release, 11.4 marks a showcase of growth and vitality for the openSUSE Project!' This release is available now (direct download and bittorrent) as installable DVD or KDE/Gnome LiveCD images, as well as being installable over a network or as a live upgrade from a previous openSUSE release. Highlights include Linux kernel 2.6.37, improved package management, KDE SC 4.6.0, Gnome 2.32 with a preview of Gnome 3, Firefox 4.0, LibreOffice 3.3.1, and the debut of a rolling release project called Tumbleweed. 11.4 images are also already available for customization on SUSEstudio, and you can build your own packages for 11.4 and other GNU/Linux distros on the openSUSE Build Service."

Re:DOA?

[tomhudson]

The problem with distrowatch numbers is they don't tell you how many people actually do installs, how many people keep their installs, etc. It's just a record of page hits.

For example, I've been using OpenSUSE since 9x ... and I didn't hit distrowatch even for that.

So, I went over to distrowatch, and it gives the OpenSUSE number as ~1200. Right now, I see 1,300 seeders and 2,200 leechers off the i586 and x86_64 dvd torrents, for a total of 3,500 - that's well over the number of people even looking at the ubuntu link, never mind actual downloads.

Re:DOA?

[MasterPatricko]

There are some statistics based on unique IPs asking for updates on en.opensuse.or/Statistics [opensuse.org]. Obviously YMMV with those numbers.

Re:DOA?

[MasterPatricko]

Fedora has similar statistics at at fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics [fedoraproject.org].

SLES/openSuse installs are everywhere

[bored]

Just not in your moms basement. I have yet to see a copy of ubuntu running in a corporate environment. On the other hand, i've seen openSUSE on peoples desktops, and SLES running in data center after data center. Look at the large OEM's linux support list. Usually its RedHat and SLES, and there is a reason. Part of that has to do with the long support cycles, the rest has to do with testing and support of "enterprise hardware". For example, zSeries mainframes, 10G ethernet, SAS, fibre channel, 300+TB RAID arrays, you quickly find that the "popular" distributions don't work. For that matter, the last time I installed ubuntu it took 20 minutes to convince it to work properly in a vmware session, it kept disconnecting the network because it's MAC detection layer wasn't working properly with the vmware adapter. Heck probably 50% of the hardware I own won't run ubuntu. (50% of my personal hardware is non x86, cause i have POWER, sparc, ARM, etc machines).

Plus, as I posted in another thread, modern Yast is actually quite good. You can configured pretty much the whole machine from it now. From basic stuff like network, disk/LVM/RAID, iscsi, etc to nearly every service the machine ships with like Samba, and Bind. While many of the configurations are basic and need further tuning, it gets the beginner most of the way down the road without having to drop to a command line or editor. The package management is just as good as anywhere else with yast/zypper, so much so I can't remember the last time i had to compile something.

Finally, SUSE's binary driver story is a lot better than anyone elses, so a lot of "proprietary" hardware just tends to work. Like say, multihead with openGL support sufficient to run blender...