Attachmate Completes Its Novell Acquisition

[deanjo]

Lack of MP3 support.

What? openSUSE has mp3 support. You even get prompted if you want to download the mp3 plugin upon first attempt.

[devius]

The other reason to use SuSE is to support Microsoft, now that it has bought Novell.

Holy crap... openSUSE is a community project sponsored by novell. Of course that in turn they get to use software developed for openSUSE on their comercial OSes. How does that translate into supporting microsoft?

About the good points of openSUSE, number one is of course the green theme It's also one of the most solid and consistent distros I've tried. They also care about user bug reports and wishlists. They go to great lengths to improve upon the upstream desktop environments. The gnome customizations that openSUSE has are just amazing (version 2 at least; still haven't tried gnome 3). XFCE is also phenomenal and much more good looking than what ships with Xubuntu, which in turn is way better than pure xfce. KDE is also more polished than the upstream version and frequently backports important fixes and patches. On top of all that, software management is much better than anything else I've tried. And like deanjo said, YAST is one of the best pieces of free software around. Imagine a tool that let's you setup apache and postfix graphically (besides a lot of other network daemons). I also remember it was one of the first distros to support opening and saving microsoft office 2010 files.

[RealNC]

Not to kick openSuSE lovers in the jewels, but what makes openSuSE so much different/better than Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora?

Lack of MP3 support.

[bridgman]

The other reason to use SuSE is to support Microsoft, now that it has bought Novell.

It's time for SuSE users to move to some Free such as Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora.

Sorry, did I miss a memo ? When did Microsoft buy Novell ?

My understanding was that Attachmate bought Novell, then sold some of the Novell patents (but not the Unix ones) to CPTN, a consortium which seems to include Microsoft and some other major technology companies.

[BlackStar]

Trollface

Not to kick openSuSE lovers in the jewels, but what makes openSuSE so much different/better than Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora?

SuSE was my first distro, but that's the only reason I've ever used it.

The other reason to use SuSE is to support Microsoft, now that it has bought Novell.

It's time for SuSE users to move to some Free such as Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora.

[V!NCENT]

I do feel like that with Ubuntu there is a shitload of obscure duct tape in place, all over the place. But with Fedora all I have to do is boot up the USB stick, it installs in a few minutes. Everything works. Then enable RPMFusion from my webbrowser, type 'yum install update' and then 'yum install preload vlc rekonq yakuake k3b wine dkms' and later figure out what I forgot. Then custom downloading the latest VirtualBox and jMonkeySDK and setting KDE to accept my freaking analog sound card as default instead of the HDMI RadeonHD sound. Oh and maybe still PowePoint viewer 2003.

Everything works like it should with the KDE spin including the blur with the Gallium3D driver.

[deanjo]

OpenSUSE doesn't fork something just because they don't like someone upstream.

ref: glibc and cdrtools.

Actually openSUSE uses wodim by default, it does however still have cdrtools on the repo and allows the user to decide.

[yogi_berra]

Not to kick openSuSE lovers in the jewels, but what makes openSuSE so much different/better than Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora?

OpenSUSE doesn't fork something just because they don't like someone upstream.

ref: glibc and cdrtools.

[deanjo]

This.

About zypper it's definitely good, however I think apt-get sports a tad more features.

What feature does apt-get have that zypper doesn't presently have?

[PsynoKhi0]

Biggest reason by far is YaST. Quite simply it has a feature set that I have yet to see matched in any other distro. It also has by far the best refined implementation of KDE as well.

This.

About zypper it's definitely good, however I think apt-get sports a tad more features.

All in all, I'd still recommend (a mono-free) Ubuntu to brand new Linux users, however if you want a stable, clean OS with a set of powerful tools, definitely check openSUSE out.