Occasional Thoughts

This article supplements my initial review. I will use the same categories, where I feel there are updates worth mentioning as well as some new ones. Please consider this article as a delta to my first impressions. To get a full understanding of this review, please read my first Kubuntu impressions first.

However as a long term SuSE user I will not simply delete my openSuSE 10.2 installation and replace it by Ubuntu. Especially since openSuSE became better and better and is currently really not a bad distribution. Also as a software developer with quite some experience in the IT world, I do not believe hypes until I experienced them myself (that's why I don't use Mac OS X or Windows Vista ).

Since I like KDE better than Gnome for its configurability, I have chosen to start with Kubuntu, the KDE version of Ubuntu.

The first step of my potential Kubuntu migration is an installation on a VMware to fiddle a little bit around with Kubuntu before passing the point of hard return, which is deleting my openSUSE installation. They may be SuSE biased and sometimes wrong, as I am not yet familar with Kubuntu. On the other side this review is intended to help SuSE users to decide, wheather it is worth to switch to Kubuntu or not - so a openSUSE bias is even intended to a certain degree.

I would be very thankful, if you could leave a comment at the end to help me in case I made a statement that is caused by my lack of knowledge about Ubuntu. And if you expecting some either openSuSE or Kubuntu bashing you'll be disappointed. Finally here are my first impressions and naive findings about Kubuntu.

Somehow SuSE has got a bad reputation: Upgrade hassles, old styled RPM packages and a outdated package management as well as the slow Yast configuration.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

Finally the day has come, where me as a long-term SuSE user (my first distribution was SuSE 5.3) is going to check out Ubuntu, or more specifically Kubuntu, the Ubuntu version with KDE.

Previously I had worked with many Distributions (Red Hat, RedHat Enterprise Edition, SuSE Enterprise Linux and Debian, all in different versions) and never got the feeling that any of these distributions is much better than SuSE. I worked with SuSE during hard times and tricky updates (6.2 to 6.3 was a real nightmare) and was with SuSE while it became better and better and evolved to the free openSUSE project. 10.2 is still the best distribution I had ever worked with and using the Smart package manager, the RPM dependency nightmares became much easier. Yast 2 is pretty good, when you want to quickly get supported hardware working or set up server software like Postfix or the firewall.