This is the second of a sequence of posts where we’ll take a look at a few of the main Linux distros to find out which are the most welcoming to Linux newbies. In our first article of this series, we took a look at Fedora 9 Beta.
openSUSE 11 Beta
This Linux distro welcomes me to a desktop which makes me wonder whether I really used the Gnome or KDE version. The Gnome desktop layout tries to take the Windows (or KDE) style a bit by placing only one panel at the bottom, which has only one ‘Computer‘ button.
When clicking on ‘Computer’ what I found was a bit too crowded and confusing. It looks like there was an attempt to shove everything in the same location, Applications, File Locations, Documents, Control Center, System Settings, Log out, Shutdown, Install Software, etc, but for me this was very confusing.
Different menus for each will get the user to the final destination faster, with only one click and probably less than a second. To open a program I can go through the search bar at the top (didn’t work for me for some reason), or I can click on “More Applications” which takes me to another window full of programs. So, a program can easily be 3-clicks away for me, the same for settings configuration.As a note, you’ve probably guessed by now that I’m more familiar with Gnome. But, even the KDE distros I’ve tested were easier to navigate through than this release.Hardware?Since I have an nVidia card, my monitor didn’t work too well. The screen was blury and the size was way off, the same I encountered with Fedora. Again, I couldn’t even correct this through a simple settings change. Once everything is installed on my HD instead of running from a live CD I am pretty sure I won’t have this problem anymore.I tried to test my microphone or speakers but the voice recorder software crashed and I also couldn’t play mp3 songs. I was able to play ogg video files, but it only had video with no audio.Good thing to note is that while on openSUSE 10.3 I wasn’t able to get access to my NTFS partitions, now I was able to see all partitions of my HD without a glitch.Software?YaST, is openSUSE’s the control center. Everything you want to configure on your computer will be found here. The list of options is pretty extensive and gives the user quite a bit of flexibility. I really liked two apps, an automated backup utility and a firewall. Here, unlike in Fedora, the firewall GUI was much easier to manage.
To install and uninstall softwares on your machine, the process is also very easy. You can easily see everything that is already installed, remove something that you want and easily add. Also, everything is nicely categorized (Development, Hardware, Productivity, etc). openSUSE came with a very nice set of applications already installed. Pretty much all the necessary softwares were present, Firefox, Pidgin, Evolution, OpenOffice, and even Banshee, Brasero, Pulse Audio, and lots more.
**First impressions results?**To be honest I was a bit disappointed with openSUSE. Speaking about the good points, I liked the collection of software installed and the nice control center. But, I had no audio and the video was poorly configured with the liveCD. Also, the menu system just didn’t work for me. Having to go through 3 clicks to open a program is just too much, I can imagine going through this many times a day isn’t very interesting. For me, in this test I would give openSUSE 11 one and a half Pinguins, but since it is a poor cruelty to chop this cute animal, I’ll give two.The problems that I encountered are most likely from openSUSE not having proprietary drivers installed, which is understandable. But, openSUSE`s Gnome layout was just too confusing for me to recommend to someone used to a Windows or KDE UI. The layout was just not effective.
Next up, we’ll take a look at the new Mandriva release.
*Note: the pictures here were snapshots taken from 10.3 openSUSE release. I couldn’t take screenshots from this 11 Beta release because Gimp wasn’t installed and the screen resolution was just too bad.