From a Potential Kubuntu Switcher to a Novell Boycotter

Wednesday, November 21. 2007

I just wanted to have a closer look on Kubuntu and compare it to openSUSE and suddenly I became a Novell boycotter on the Boycott Novell site. Obviously this needs some clarifications.

Somehow SuSE has got a bad reputation: Upgrade hassles, old styled RPM packages and a outdated package management as well as the slow Yast configuration.

And yes, there was indeed a time, when SuSE had serious problems here. I remember the 7.x series, where a upgrade and even a fresh installation failed sometimes. When a reconfiguration of server processes was required after a simple update to the next minor release. When I had to search and google for RPM packages that where required and eventually ended in compiling these packages on my own. When Yast often did not do, what I expected.


Well, things have changed, folks. Lately I did an upgrade from SuSE 9.1 to 10.2. Not a single problem and I really wouldn't consider my previous system to be clean. I installed a lot of custom packages.

RPM dependencies? No problem, since SuSE contains the Smart package manager. Smart is really cool once it is set up and the correct channels are chosen. The only thing I do not understand is why SuSE does not use Smart by default, but are still following their own way.

It's also a long time ago, when Yast screwed up my system for the last time.

So openSuSE is not a bad choice and I will definitely not ditch it for some misinterpreted political reasons. It's more about being curious.

In the meantime I tested (K)Ubuntu on a VMware and as soon as I get enough time I will write a detailed posting about my findings. So far I just betray one point: There are still some points, were openSuSE beats Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

Please be patient. I'll write more as soon as I can.


Posted by Carsten Schlipf Filed under Linux.
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    First Kubuntu Impressions
    As I already wrote I am getting curious what is really behind this Ubuntu hype. All the time I google for some kind of problems I find plenty of information dedicated to Ubuntu. Colleagues started to use Ubuntu and are happy with it. Also the media repo
    Weblog: The Occasional Thoughts of Yaba
    Tracked: Dec 11, 21:52

Comments


    #1 Sonny on 11/26/07 at 08:30 AM [Reply]
    *Hi. I wish you luck with your testing, but I personally have found that openSUSE is the way to go. I recently installed 10.3 on my box, and there are several major improvements.

    I was wondering, however, about the system monitor you are using and which can be seen in the screenshots for the Titanium theme. I think it looks real slick and I would like to set up a similar interface, but I can't for the life of me figure out what you're using.

    If you could drop me an e-mail, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks
    #1.1 Yaba on 11/26/07 at 12:39 PM [Reply]
    *Hi Sonny,

    thank you for your comment. Have you noticed that improvements when upgrading from 10.2 to 10.3? One major reason to switch to Kubuntu is still the support of suspend2 and I haven't found out, if that is the case for openSUSE 10.3 yet.

    The system monitor in the screenshot is conky. However you'll have to disable desktop icons to make it work under KDE.

    Regards,
    Carsten
    #1.1.1 Sonny on 11/26/07 at 03:24 PM [Reply]
    *Thanks for the response. I'm actually not sure about the suspend support. In fact, I'm pretty sure suspend2 fried my laptop (dv6113us, luckily HP replaced if free of charge). So now I'm apprehensive of using suspend at all...
    #2 Sparti on 12/09/07 at 02:00 PM [Reply]
    *Well, similar as you I'm using SuSE over a long period, with the same experiances as you had. And yesterday I also thought its time to give Kubuntu a chance.


    All in all I'm impressed by simplicity of the Kubuntu installation. The package manager is easy to use and I nearly found all packages I need for my daily work as a software developer.

    Nevertheless I experianced a couple of serious problems that I would not expect from a distribution meant for beginners. Last time I saw these type of problems was a SuSE 7 or 8.

    First ther is a minor issue during install. The installer is so very slow. Especially the partitioner is going to sleep without any obvious reason. As far as I could see its doing some lots of checks in the background, whenever you change a partition. A couple of times I thought that the installer crashed and I was close to cancel the installation.

    But I found two more problems. The first one is a problem in the kernel version 2.6.22.14. It causes a couple of seeking errors during boot time. First I saw that I expected a disk failure. But a smarttools couldn't find any problems. Also a SuSE boot disk didn't show any errors.

    Second problem was even worse. After I rebooted into my fresh Kubuntu installation, I started Adept in order to do an update. Adept is easy to use and I quickly figured out how to do that. But when Adept installed my selected updates, it suddenly crashed before it commited all changes. I tried to restart it but it crashed again two times until I manually removed a lock. Now I could start Adept again. I expected that the update failed I asked it to update again. But now Adept told me that there are are no updates available anymore. But how could that happen if the last update was incomplete? Unforuntely some minutes later it crashed again, when I tried to install something. Evenso Adept did not claim a successfull install and I could try it sucessfully again.

    After a couple of hours working with Kubuntu I'm convinced that it is an easy and usefull distribution - even for developers. But I'm a bit concerned because of the quality issues I found.
    #3 Alakazam on 12/14/07 at 04:09 AM [Reply]
    *Not a Novell boycotter? But well, you should be. I don't like a company that aids MS in their attempt to add a tax for web browsing (Silverlight) get informed.

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