sontek ( John M. Anderson )

In response to Herlo’s reviews of openSUSE here and here , I thought I’d give Fedora 8 a shot and give an openSUSE user’s perspective.

Lets start with the bad:
First, during the installation it detected my video resolution wrong (nvidia 6800gt) so I had to do my installation without being able to read most of the screen (didn’t see any easy way to switch to text mode, I was using PXE). I did not have this issue with Ubuntu or openSUSE 10.3 on the same computer but I tried a different computer with an Intel video card and couldn’t reproduce the error.

Second, for some reason the nspluginwrapper was installed by default and caused Firefox to be extremely unstable and crash on any website that had embedded audio or video, once I removed the package Firefox became much more stable. Having it installed by default really made no sense because the computer I was running was a 32-bit system and the point of nspluginwrapper is to allow PPC and AMD64 users to run 32-bit plug-ins.

Third, codecs (mp3, video) were not easily installable. I understand that Fedora can’t include these in the distribution but I would’ve loved an easy way to retrieve them. I had to add extra repositories manually (after googling and finding which ones I needed) and then install them. In openSUSE the community repositories are readily available in yast and all I have to do is enable them, there is also the 1-Click install so you do not have to locate/add any repositories. Codecbuddy is a noble attempt but I would like more options than Fluendo.

Fourth, Flash was not readily available (it comes by default in openSUSE 10.3) and I had to search around the Internet (again) for a repository that included it. Luckily Adobe does provide a Fedora specific repository but I think this repository should be included by default in Fedora (or easily enabled).

Fifth, By default Fedora has chosen the iwlwifi drives for my Intel wireless which is great because its a completely open source driver that does not require a service running. But there are some known bugs in this driver and required me to modify my home network so I could connect to it and I can’t connect to my work network at all. This decision would not bother me except that they do not provide the closed ipw3945 drivers in the repositories as an alternative (openSUSE 10.3 provides iwl as an alternative in the repos).

Sixth, I’ve eluded to this a few times already but openSUSE 10.3 provides many community repositories in yast ready to be enabled but it’s also easy to add and find new ones through webpin and the openSUSE build service and add them quickly through yast/zypper. With Fedora it is a little more complicated to locate and add repositories.

Seventh, Most of the system-config-* applications required a running X server, so I was not able to manage my computer remotely with the provided tools. (boot, date, network, packages, printer, selinux, services, time, and users). Not only did they not have a cli/ncurses based interface, some of them even crashed with python errors instead of letting me know I needed X or they gave me a notice that they are deprecated. Why would you want to enforce configuration tools to require X? These tools also did not provide a central “Dashboard” to use them, so a user has to “Just know” what tool to use for the job, they can’t just browse around an easy to use control panel.

Eighth, By default NetworkManager was not on, I can’t think of any reason not to enable NetworkManager by default on a desktop distribution, especially when a wireless network card is available.

Most of the issues aren’t that big of a problem to solve for relatively experienced Linux users but I think they would be show stoppers and scare regular users away from Linux, there are also some issues with Fedora that are more personal preference than bugs:

First, I think clearlooks is a much better theme than the default Fedora one.
Second, I prefer the SLAB menu from openSUSE. Novell did a lot of usability research that I don’t think should be overlooked and even if Fedora doesn’t want to provide it by default, it should at least be in the repositories or an option in the installation. I found it very difficult to find the things I needed, one example was I wanted to modify SELinux to be permissive instead of enforcing, so I went to System->Administration and it wasn’t there, I had to go Applications->System Tools->SELinux Management. What is the difference between Applications->System Tools and System->Administration and why doesn’t SELinux fit in the latter?

Now that we’ve hit the bad and ugly, lets end on a good note?

First, I really love yum over yast’s package management module/zypper. The console output is a lot more detailed and the GTK interface isn’t as invasive as yast’s (yast’s GTK interface takes focus as it runs updates, so its nearly impossible to use the computer while using it). Also, zypper/yast is unbearably slow, I turn auto-refresh off and only update when I know I have time to wait. Yum on the other hand is lightning fast and I wasn’t afraid to use it.

Second, Bluetooth support was enabled by default, although the default configuration didn’t allow me to connect to my phone, its nice to actually have devices detected and ready to be configured out of the box.

So, overall my personal preference is for openSUSE, I think the advantages out weigh the downfalls but at the same time I believe both distros could learn from each other.