Dr. Suse

I've recently installed openSUSE 11.4 on my Lenovo ideapad z560. I've actually done it twice in the past month because my hard drive died and needed to be replaced (more on that later).

First impressions on install are great. The openSUSE installer has a good reputation and lives up to it. The options are straightforward and it goes in very smoothly from the downloaded DVD. All of hardware in my z560 is supported with out a hitch and overall the installation is a breeze. Answer a few questions, and you are good to go. The wireless network just works and I haven't found anything that doesn't function as expected.

The KDE Plasma desktop looks and works great. I'd historically been a Ubuntu/GNOME user, but I decided to go with KDE to give it a try and I haven't been disappointed. I'm still getting used to some of the differences, but so far it's been very easy to adapt to.

The included software is solid. LibreOffice 3.3.1 is nice and works well, Okular is an excellent PDF viewer and the rest of the basic programs just work. I haven't installed very many applications to date except VirtualBox 4. The YaST software manager is nice and works well (you do need to add some repositories in that are not added by default to get user contributed software in the install list). One strange thing is that the installer includes a beta version of Firefox 4 which I immediately upgraded to Firefox 5. I guess they didn't have the released version of 4 ready yet when openSUSE 11.4 shipped.

I was able to connect to my ancient HP 1012 printer easily. The only thing that was at all complex was that I had to update the firewall to allow SMB connections which was easy to figure out but not clear from the printer setup wizard.  Interestingly after I ran the upgrade to the latest patches in YaST, I could no longer browse my SMB systems on the network. Not sure what that is all about right now. 

An interesting little problem cropped up with the Flash Player in Firefox. Basically, when rolling over an interactive section of a Flash interface weird blank boxes would appear over the interface and it was pretty unusable. I was pleasantly impressed with the quality of support in the openSUSE forums and was able to find a fix very quickly. 


Overall, I'm pretty happy with it so far. It is taking a bit of time to get used to the differences from Ubuntu 10.04, but I think openSUSE is going to be a keeper.