Friday, November 2, 2012

OpenSUSE 12.2: First Impressions

I've always had a weak spot for OpenSUSE, maybe because I love the color--green--and the cute lil lizard. On the technical end, it boasts the latest Linux kernel among just about all the major distros, including Linux Mint, and that's important to me because the later versions include improvements for the AMD/ATI GPU.

I decided to attempt to install in UEFI mode, which didn't work with Linux Mint 13 for some reason. With Open SUSE 12.2, my Network Install CD didn't get anywhere, and I don't know why because I couldn't read the text on the screen due to the boot manager displaying with 1600x1200 resolution on my 800x600 screen. So I threw that install CD in the garbage can and downloaded and burned a full installation DVD, 4.3 GB. I had a much better experience with that. Everything worked. My ASUS E350M1-M motherboard booted the OpenSUSE 12.2 Install DVD in UEFI mode, and OpenSUSE for its part partitioned my drive using the latest and greatest GPT rather than grandmother's MBR.

From the get-go I had the feeling that yes, this is a professional operating system, and just maybe this compares with Windows. Due to my building confidence in OpenSUSE I decided to just accept all the defaults and I haven't regretted it yet. KDE looks light-years above Gnome, although there does seem to be a few things I need to learn about it. The look and feel, though--definitely OpenSUSE has it.

I'm going to print out all the documentation I can from the web site tonight and read the entire manual. You know what, with Linux Mint the manual was outdated by two versions or so and wasn't much to begin with, just a collection of platitudes for the most part and reasons why Linux Mint is the greatest OS on Earth. I will see whether OpenSUSE is any different. I hope that it is. Right now I have a very favorable impression of OpenSUSE based on the ease of installation and the fact it didn't hiccup over UEFI. Plus, it's beautiful.Post a Comment
by igor 04:20 4 replies by igor 09:32 0 comments

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