OpenSUSE 13.1 Released and Reviewed 113
sfcrazy writes "The openSUSE team just announced the release of openSUSE 13.1. There are some core points which set openSUSE apart from the popular Ubuntu distro. While Ubuntu has become a more or less Canonical-owned project, openSUSE is becoming more and more community-driven. Looking at the recent controversies around Ubuntu and their move toward mobile platforms, openSUSE seems to be a great option for desktop users."
Re:Yet Another Stupid Tool (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually consider YAST2 (the "s" stands for "Setup", by the way, though it does much more than OS installation and package management) one of the key reasons to use [open]Suse. All-in-one-place administration of the system, available through several different UIs (QT/KDE3, QT/KDE4, GTK, ncurses, and probably more), is nice. It provides pretty extensive help information explaining each of the options even in the "Advanced" panels. It lets you view the config files it's changing right in the tool, including editing them yourself (in case you can't find the option you're looking for in the UI). It tells you what it's doing at every step (writing this file, running that tool, disabling or enabling interfaces, loading or unloading drivers, etc.).
It's actually helped me become better at *nix administration in general, because it gives me the ability to see what's possible (not literally every option, but far more than the typical ~20% that is all that 80% of users ever need), and to see what changes it makes to the system when I select those options (so I can duplicate them myself, including on other distros or even on non-Linux POSIX systems in many cases). The preponderance of UIs (more accurately, of UI toolkits; the actual UI always looks about the same) means that even if the X server won't start, or I'm SSHed into the box and don't want to deal with X forwarding, or I'm on the machine of somebody who uses GNOME (I prefer KDE), I can sudo yast2 and get a familiar set of tools. It's a truly handy utility.
And, as the AC parent indicates, it is of course optional and open-source. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you think there's a problem, file a bug report, or patch it yourself, maybe submit your patch if you want to. But believe me, it beats all the other distros' admin tools (at least, among the many versions of 8 or so reasonably popular distros that I've tried, including quite a few versions of Ubuntu) hands down.
"An OS for grown-ups"? (Score:4, Insightful)
openSUSE 13.1 review – an OS for grown-ups
If you have to call it "an OS for grown-ups" it makes it sound like it really isn't.
Did you mean hipsters?