So far it’s shaping up to be a year of changes. Some milestone birthdays, the family website on a content management system (at long last), and now, a change of operating system.
After about 3 years of running Kubuntu on the family desktop, I’ve switched to openSUSE. Not a huge change I guess, switching from one flavour of Linux to another. Certainly the difference isn’t apparent to my wife, beyond some minor cosmetic issues. Specifically, the big K that used to signify the launch button in the lower left corner of the screen is now a green gecko logo. But to me, it feels more significant.
I last used openSUSE before it was called such. I chose SUSE Linux 10.1 as my OS when I returned to graduate school in the fall of 2006. While I’d been a hardcore Debian user up until that point, I hadn’t had any experience with Debian on laptops. In order to get up and productive as quickly as possible, I started the first semester with a more polished, corporate OS. I liked it fine. It certainly looked more striking than raw Debian, but architecturally it turned out to be much rawer. The package manager was especially cumbersome. I coped with this in the short term by switching to the Smart package manager, but this didn’t prevent the dependency problems inherent with an RPM-based system.
I’ve always admired Debian’s APT system. It’s fast, efficient, solid, and provides sensible options to resolve issues with conflicting software packages. I’ve never had a system I couldn’t salvage, no matter how difficult I’d made a situation through experimentation or idle tinkering. 🙂
Ultimately, what drove me away from Kubuntu wasn’t its overall function or diminished feature set (in comparison to Ubuntu), but… lingering OpenOffice problems.
For some time, I’ve been bothered with the slowness of the suite on Kubuntu. I did quite a bit of research and tinkering, but was never able to resolve the insanely slow dialogue boxes, particularly when saving files. The problem was though to be the KDE 4 integration package. It made the icons and operability with Kubuntu wonderful, at the expense of making it absolutely painful to use.
I’d heard glowing reports about the new SUSE release, so I back up all the family data on an external firewire drive, and reinstalled from scratch. It wasn’t perfectly painless. Finding repositories for those evil but essential proprietary software packages and drivers took some time, as did getting my accelerated video and wireless networking up and going. In these areas I still have to give a serious advantage to Kubuntu / Ubuntu. It was more than just lack of familiarity that held me back; Canonical’s products really do a much better job of harnessing hardware that requires proprietary drivers.
Overall though, I’m quite satisfied. There have been some other changes needed. In particular, I had to replace the rather lame duck version of KTorrent that openSUSE provides with the fully functioning version from the Packman repositories. But the most important thing, my office suite, now works perfectly and looks great.
It’s funny what it can take to make a person change. OpenOffice was my deal breaker. It makes it easier for me to understand how the desire for Microsoft Office is the deal breaker that prevents many people from switching to Linux.
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