Adventures in Linux Land

I recently bought a new hard drive and decided to start with a clean install of my favorite OS–OpenSUSE 11.0 with KDE 4.2. I’ve used both OpenSUSE and Ubuntu for years. OpenSUSE was my favorite up until this fresh install. There were so many dependencies errors that neither KDE nor Gnome nor XFCE were completely functional.

So I downloaded OpenSUSE 11.1, thinking that it might not have the same problems. Not only did OpenSUSE 11.1 have serious out of the box dependency issues, it was also slow as molasses. After spending six hours disabling everything from the IPv6, which it uses by default for repositories that don’t support IPv6, and downloading the graphics support for my IBM NetVista Pentium 4 (which was included in the 11.0 original install) and making numerous other tweaks, I quit and installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which just works.

The only problem with Ubuntu 8.04 is it doesn’t have the latest KDE 4.2 in the repositories because it is a long term version. While I respect that decision, KDE 4.03, which reminds me of Vista in that it’s an alpha that some marketing idiot labeled final release, shouldn’t be used by anyone interested in a stable production environment. I am currently compiling the source for KDE 4.2 and crossing my fingers that my lovely KDE desktop will resurface. (Yes, I could use the latest Kubuntu. I tried it. It was missing crucial screen resolution settings…)

I hate writing about this experience and sincerely hope the lovely people in the OpenSUSE community get their act together. Linux distributions are highly competitive and breaking what was one of the best linux distributions is a sure way to kill your project.

P.S. I did post bug reports with the OpenSUSE community and discussed the very strange problems I was experiencing in the forums. The machine I did the fresh install on was an OpenSUSE 11.0 machine prior to the install and did not experience any of these problems.

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