I know that this forum still is more Ubuntu oriented when I comes to Linux, but as I stated in another thread. I recommend SUSE to all people new to the Linux world.

compared with Ubuntu it has:

*better hardware support out of the box.
*faster boot up time
*SUSE and NOVELL are two major KDE and GNOME upstream contributors (You see the new stuff there first)
*way more polished (not talking about artwork)
*YAST which is by far the easiest and most complete system configuation tool. Now with an GTK interface integrated in the GNOME-Desktop


Default KDE Desktop:


Default GNOME Desktop:


links:
openSUSE.org
Screenshots/openSUSE 10.3 - openSUSE
Software.openSUSE.org (download)

I just installed it on a second partition. It seems nice, but I'm not used to it yet. I know where everything is in ubuntu, but not yet for suse. Still, I'll probably stay with it for a while. Thanks for the tip.

Speaking of knowing where things are....

I have a lovely little script that I wrote that automates my wireless connection. In ubuntu, I stuck it in rc.local. Does suse have a counterpart to rc.local?

cp it to /usr/bin/ and call it from /etc/init.d/boot.local

thx!

Whats the (overall) difference between 10.2 and 10.3

I tried the 10.2 out for a couple of weeks ago, but found it a little too unreachable, if i can use that term.

But i'll definitely give it another go, if it's worth trying out, compared to it's predecessor, to a Suse noob.

I don't really know what you mean by unreachable. I tried 10.2 a while back, but don't really remember it. Just now when I stuck 10.3 on here, most things worked out of the box. The only things that didn't were the wireless card and my ATI graphics card---but they don't work out of the box with anything (Windows included, incidentally). Pretty much everything works like it should, and adding software is similar to the way it's done in ubuntu (yast instead of synaptic---both are intuitive point and click). The biggest issue that I have found is that if you go to the command line to try to do something, stuff isn't where I expect it to be (I've pretty much only used Debian and Ubuntu before). I use KDE, and the desktop is much smoother and more polished with suse than with kubuntu. That's about all I can tell you, I'm sure others will have other perspectives.

Well by unreachable, i ment something like everything is hard to get to. Nothing is where it's supposed to be (in my opinion, at least) but from what you write, i think nothing has changed in that department.

I'm quite happy with the way Ubuntu works, and everything is familiar to me in Ubuntu and debian. But i think it doesn't hurt to try out other distros every once in a while, just to see if there is something just as good. So far, i've been over PclinuxOS, Suse, Mandrake (a long time ago), Damn small linux, xubuntu, Arch, and so on. In the end, i always fire up Ubuntu at get the feeling of home.

http://opensuse-community.org/ati.ymp one click installer.

or the hotwo page

ATI - openSUSE


both ati and nvidia have driver repositories for suse.

HOWTOs - openSUSE

useful

Yep. I found that. Pretty easy, but not quite out of the box.

Thanks for that. What is the definitive SUSE forum?

Would think it is SUSE Forums (Powered by Invision Power Board)

Could be.

Communicate/Forums - openSUSE

There's a list of some forums.

Although there is not one huge forum like Ubuntu Forums amongst them.

The Suse distribution is now about 13 years old and it's usually an part of general linux boards.

does openSUSE support multiple desktops like ubuntu?

If you mean workspaces, yes, of course. These are part of the window managers (metactiy, kwin, compiz for example).

ahh, I didn't know that

anyone know about installing from an existing system???

both gentoo and debian can be installed from an existing system, allowing me to use my working desktop to manage the installation from, not having to worry about downloading all those extra files and burning them onto a cd...