openSuse 11.4

Today I have been sorting my work laptops Linux partition.

Up until recently I have been using Kubuntu on Kermit my work laptop. This was down to it being the CD I had to hand when setting the laptop up for some Linux based development work. Kubuntu was OK but it never seemed as fluid as Arch which is the distro I use by choice. When it came to running the upgrade between 10.10 and 4.11, it just failed and bricked the partition. If ever I loved Arch's rolling release model more it was then! So today, wanting a distro that I could just install and use, I opted to try openSuse 11.4. I haven't used Suse since about version 9.3, so it has been a while. So far I am very impressed. It boots fast and looks great. I have set up my standard apps and over the next few days I will get my development environment set up so fingers crossed I can use this for a while without issues.

The KDE implementation seems to be much more polished than Kubuntu. In fact I would say this is the best, most well integrated and polished 4.6 implementation I have seen so far.

The only gotcha I have faced was that the installer defaulted the host name to some standard string. It's easy to fix, open the /etc/HOSTNAME file in your favorite editor as root and change the single entry to the desired host name. Save the file and all is well in the world. Simple fix but it would be nicer if the installer did a better job with regard to this.