TFS says it runs different desktops; take your pick. The last time I tried Suse was ten years ago. I would have liked it if half of my hardware would have worked (especially the video card). I think I'll give it another try, I have to downgrade kubuntu anyway since the latest upgrade broke Flash, and Amarok now freezes the PC if I leave it running for more than a few days. If Suse gives me trouble I'll just reinstall the earlier kubuntu (I shouldn't have upgraded, it was working fine).

Yeah, I know, I need more memory... but this isn't Windows. It should just work, like Mandrake always did. Aramok needs to work on their memory leaks.

Yes, KNetworkManager has connected to wireless networks without root privileges since forever.

GUI - "some kind of sense" is subjective and vague. Here's a current screenshot from YaST 2.21.24 in openSUSE 12.1: http://i.imgur.com/06QLC.png [imgur.com] Point out what you don't like or what you think needs to be improved.

thats cause you're using traditional network management... for wireless network without root you need to use network-manager based control... ie gnome-nm-applet or kde network applet.

I think you misunderstand what Yast is these days. It's for the quickening of the tasks you might want to do as a sysadmin. Need to enable X forwarding for SSH? You can dig up the location of the config file, find the appropriate line, and type in the appropriate word to enable it (yes, enable, y, or on?) or you can go to Yast, hit SSH, check X forwarding and be done with it.
Need to run VNC like an X session? Yast can do it in about 3 seconds. The GUI makes more sense than googling around, editing a config file, cutting/pasting something you found on a forum, and crossing your fingers.
TV card not automatically detected? Easy with yast, no sudo modprobing blues.

But that's not the reason to use openSUSE. The reason to use openSUSE is you can go to http://www.susestudio.com and spin your own distro in about 10 minutes running every piece of software you want and no software you don't.

Also, has the Yast GUI been fixed to make some kind of sense?

It always made sense to me. It's one of the top 3 reasons I stick with openSuse. The "pattern" concept in recent YaSTs is a little confusing at first (only because it complicates the GUI) - but once you've used it you don't want to go back.

YaST seems to combine the best of Windows style configuration GUI's, with a better view of the underlying mechanisms, and it put's everything in one place in a way that I've not encountered elsewhere in Windows or Linux.

I agree, and as an autist sperglord, I demand that my release summaries contain as many acronyms as possible. Crapple iSheeple iDiots, hold on while I remove my battery from my Samsung Galaxy S III 4G One X Nexus Epic Touch Prime MAXX LTE with Beats by Dre since it froze up again.

Such a hoot you losers are. You do understand these are facts don't you? And you mod down FACTS?

Suck it up commies.

There never WAS an official XFCE ISO. There are several way to get XFCE without installing the rest
1) Download the DVD and do the installation. During installation you select Other instead of KDE/GNOME and select XFCE or LXDE there
2) Do a network install and select XFCE or LXDE just like above
2a) http://www.houghi.org/ssh/install.php [houghi.org] and then do the same as above. Basically this is a network install without the iso.
3) Wait for http://susestudio.com/ [susestudio.com] to have 12.2 available and make your own image.

Shut the fuck up, fanny bandit. Stop being a cock-smoking teabgager and pay your fucking $699 licensing fee!L

Its not as good as metro or an iphone you poseur faggot trying to sound smart on slash dot

I'm glad I don't have to put up with that Linux nonsense. What's all this Gnome crap about anyway? If I'm using a Unix-like OS I want command line, dagnabbit!

Yes the 11.2 and 11.4 were very good releases. But that is pretty normal for OpenSuse. Really good releases interspersed with an occasional not so good developmental release.

I suspect 12.2 will be pretty good based on all the fixes applied and lessons learned from the early 12.x versions.

And how much longer is 11.4 supported? Quick google of wiki suggests that ends next month...

This could form the basis of an Ask Slashdot: Since there's a whole lot of love here for Gnome 2.x, what's the distro that'll be last standing for that GUI?

Disclaimer: I'm using Ubuntu 10.04, which means I'll finally have to decide what GUI to jump to next in April.

DID try 12.1 quite a lot and was terribly disappointed.

Reformated harddrive and reinstalled 11.4 - and HAPPY!

WHY?

11.4 has GNOME 2 - Now THAT's a GREAT UI.

If you hate Gnome 3, it is better to switch to XFCE, or LXDE, or KDE than to cling to an obsolete OS.

That's good to hear. I've skipped every other release and only done the upgrade after the system was getting real crusty. I have a nice backup setup now and upgrading every other year or so seems pretty reasonable as long as the system still makes sense. I've stuck with Suse since 1998 or so. Back then it was the distribution that was the most complete out of the box.

I'll wait for the core to stabilize for a few months and then do the update during the winter break. Setting up openSuse 12.1only took a few hours to get the final pieces to work and was mostly flawless. Best in a long time for me. 11.4 gave me headaches because of the NVIDIA open source driver and the crap I went through to switch to the proprietary X drivers. They may get it stable some day but I actually USE my system.

Yes! It ships KDE 3.5.10 with improvements to make it work with upower and udisks.

The gecko Geeko [opensuse.org] has been the SUSE mascot since a long time.

Lucid is from April 2010. That's not 2 months ago.

reviews in German language/with screenshots: http://heise.de/-1699388 [heise.de] http://www.golem.de/news/opensuse-12-2-verspaetet-und-deshalb-stabil-1209-94353.html [golem.de]

in 12.2. See earlier comments.

and they got plushies!

Are you trolling or do you actually pick your distro based off of it's name/logo?

The BSDs are a great fit for you then. Bootsplashes aren't exactly what are prioritised in BSD-land.

Press esc.
Now get out of the way of progress

Agreed, I preferred it when my hosed system just froze on bootup, stopping at "L I ".

Both are optional. Grub1 is still available. In fact Grub is not touched at all when upgrading.

I installed the Release Candidate for 12.2 about 3 weeks ago on a new machine. Been really smooth so far. KDE with sandybridge graphics is a really good, glitch free desktop. One amusing issue its the notification applet producing a popup to announce that konsole has rung the bell.

Last Friday I got caught out though. I had created an LVM snapshot of the root file system and it seems the dm_snapshot module has been omitted from initramfs. The kernel won't mount a volume from which a snapshot is derived (because the kernel is obligated to COW segments to maintain the snapshot) without that module so the system was unbootable.

Took a bit to figure that one out. Boot the live CD, delete the snapshot and all was well.

I'd give it a month or two if you're not ready to cope with stuff like that. Otherwise I agree with the characterization from the story; 12.2 looks like a good release.

I believe this means they're implementing the draft version of FHS 3.0, which hadn't been changed since 2004.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb/fhs-30-draft-1

Actually it just means they're eliminating the distinction between /foo and /usr/foo, which has always caused more problems than it solved (quick, is "#! /bin/env" or "#! /usr/bin/env" correct? What about for bash?) -- but don't let mere facts get in the way of a good rant.

Gee. Isn't life tough. As I remember from eons ago, Windows is AT LEAST as wrenching. If you're REALLY serious about stability, reliability and freedom from bloat a la systemd, udev, plymouth, la de da, and are willing to invest time up front in return for that continuing stability, allow me to suggest trying out FreeBSD [freebsd.org] or its desktop friendly derivative, PC-BSD [pcbsd.org]. This would require some real dedication to learn the idiosyncracies. Just to clear one thing up, FreeBSD isn't rocket science to install a DE on. I was doing it a decade ago without much trouble. It doesn't hold your hand and automate everything like PC-BSD does, though.

If you mostly just want a linux desktop that doesn't put you through effing with big changes every year to stay supported, you could do what I did. Install Redhat Enterprise 6 or any of its free derivatives (notably CentOS [centos.org], Scientific Linux [scientificlinux.org], PUIAS Linux [ias.edu]). That way you're good to stay on the same major release, fully supported, hardware-and-feature-back-ported, bug-fixed, and security-updated with good old GNOME 2.32 to at least 2017. I'm a little worried about what RHEL 7's default desktop will look like when it rolls out maybe some time during 2014, but I'm very confident you'll just be able to choose Xfce (as you can now in 6), and anyway there's really no need to make the jump from 6 to 7 until 2017.

From 11.3? Your upgrade will fail, unless you work through each upgrade manually (11.3-11.4->12.1->12.2), otherwise various conversions will not be done. You need a clean install.

Some verifiable facts, examples and explanations, or you're full of shit.

It's the same thing. SuSE used to have a more closed developmental process, but some time during Novell's ownership, it become fully open-source and renamed the community version to OpenSUSE. Novell (which was acquired by Attachmate) sells a commercial version, SUSE Linux Enterprise. You should try it out some time. I like it a lot because it arguably has the best KDE experience with the latest releases, but its GNOME, XFCE and other environments are also great, even for power users.

SUSE is mainly SUSE Linux Enterprise which is comercial distribution with less packages and much longer support. openSUSE (mind the lowercase o at the beggining) is community driven distribution SLE is based upon

The same as Red Hat (Enterprise Linux) and Fedora.