Trying Out The OpenSUSE 13.2 Beta: The Installer Is Still Lacking

With today's openSUSE 13.2 Beta release I decided to give it a whirl on the Core i7 5960X test system to see how things go for this latest openSUSE update gearing up for its official debut in November.

Overall, openSUSE 13.2 is shaping up nicely and it's great to finally see a tier-one (non-enterprise) desktop distribution using the Btrfs file-system by default. Worth pointing out though is that by default its installer is promoting a separate XFS partition for all /home data.

I've been testing out the openSUSE 13.2 Beta 1 release for the past few hours and I've been happy with it -- post-install. While YaST is being improved for openSUSE 13.2, the installer remains a mess in my opinion and is still likely the worst GUI-based Linux distribution installer I've encountered in recent years. The installer isn't still very intuitive, when booting the DVD image from a USB stick the installer by default still tries to install to that flash stick (sdb) rather than the internal disk drive (sda), and the installer still takes a painfully long time compared to other distributions. Ubuntu's Ubiquity and Fedora's Anaconda blow the openSUSE 13.2 installer still out of the water in speed, which was slow even for the i7-5960X EE eight-core CPU with solid-state drive. Hopefully more installer improvements are coming prior to the official 13.2 release.

Once to the KDE desktop though, openSUSE 13.2 Beta 1 has been playing nicely and it's running fine via the Linux 3.16.2 kernel, KDE 4.14.0, X.Org Server 1.16.0, and GCC 4.8.3. I'm in the process of running some benchmarks comparing openSUSE 13.1 vs. 13.2 Beta 1 (along with a larger distribution comparison in a follow-up article) and hope to have those results out this week. If you want to do any SUSE benchmarking, fire up the Phoronix Test Suite for turn-key, fully-automated benchmarking on openSUSE and many other Linux distributions along with BSDs, Solaris, and OS X.