Here at BoycottNovell we have adopted this tradition of occasionally posting SLED/SLES/Opensuse reviews. Two reviews have caught our attention since the last installment. We are not being selective as far as these reviews are concerned. The intent is to point out every decent and elaborate review that's found.

1. OpenSuse 10.2 Review

I looked at OpenSuse 10.2 as a Win2k replacement. I've been impressed with Suse over the years so I was looking forward to see what Novell brought to the table with 10.2. Like I said before, I am not going to judge a distribution on its setup process (OS installation, mp3 setup, flash setup, adding printer, etc), however I am going to mention some installation pitfalls I ran into during the 10.2 install.

2. openSUSE 10.2

Conclusion

openSUSE is a stable, fast and very powerful distribution, capable of anything Linux without having to do a lot of extra work, as there are RPM-packages for virtually everything. It is not the most user-friendly distribution, as the installation gives the user some tough choices (although hitting next will give a good default, I think such options should be hidden away from the beginners) and playing DVDs and listening to MP3s or WMAs, or watching live-content from the web, is not possible without installing unofficial packages. Finding and installing these packages feels like breaking the law, as there's warnings all over the official documentation warning agains making such content possible - but it isn't illegal, unless you live in the USA.

If you are a power-user you will not feel in any way cheated for options. Even though YaST is a GUI for managing virtually everything, it doesn't hide any options, and even if you feel like hacking your configurations on your own, feel free to do so. If something goes wrong, it's easy to restore configurations with YaST. Some parts, especially the package-manager, is quite slow as it does a lot of unnecessary tasks before and after you install anything (like it always updates your list of fonts, even when you haven't installed or removed any fonts).

If you're a beginner there's easier distributions out there, but not necessarily better, as openSUSE is fast and very stable, but it's just not that intuitive.