Installing from the DVD, I chose the i586 version. All the hardware was detected except my monitor (Dell P1230) and my old dot-matrix printer, naturally. I don’t like the lack of fine control over such things as resolution and paper size when installing a printer in YaST. It took some hunting to find an interface control that allowed me to choose. I also had to fiddle with the Quickcam Messenger, but those were minor issues I expected. Thus far, the only real complaint I have is SUSE ignoring the BIOS settings about which type of harddrive gets boot priority. I have a SATA drive which is read as /dev/sdb and a regular ATA drive which reads as /dev/sda. While the BIOS looks at the SATA drive, SUSE only looks at the ATA if it is installed.
True to my word, I chose the GNOME desktop. An interesting feature I had not seen before was installing the desktop by discrete images instead of a stack of RPMs. It made things much faster. Also interesting was switching from the kernel run from the DVD to the installed kernel without a reboot. As soon as I was logged in, I chased down the one-click installations of the nVidia drivers and codecs collection. I shifted a selection of my $HOME files from backup and things were picked up nicely. Then I added stuff which SUSE does not offer.
This is where it got interesting, reminding me why I hate the GNOME desktop. I installed gvim because I like to run Cream on top of it to write my articles. I compose in XHTML on the fly and prefer the extravagant syntax highlighting offered by Vim. When testing my settings for Cream, as soon as my pointer touched the interface, the entire desktop froze. The mouse moved, but didn’t activate anything. I couldn’t do anything to kill the process, except the keyboard worked; I could switch to a virtual terminal and log in to kill it there. Once I came back to the X server, everything was fine. I went through the exercise a couple more times to make sure. This, in my experience, is the way GNOME works, or shall we say, doesn’t work.
Having selected IceWM (GNOME-enabled) during the installation package choices, I switched quickly to that. Testing Cream again, there were no problems. There is only one reason for choosing the GNOME desktop. While the tools included are generally equivalent for both KDE and GNOME, the latter does not require running any massive background processes. KDE requires the DCOP server, and it takes a noticeable bite out of the RAM. It seems to bring a few other oddball visual effects I don’t get when I run GNOME applications in IceWM. I can access the games, various utilities, and not have to worry too much about extraneous processes interrupting my activity. A few applications also dock into the IceWM toolbar, such as Pidgin. Aside from the usual preferences chase for IceWM, something I learned how to configure several years ago, the only thing I had to add was one tweak to get rid of the over-sized fonts. In my ~/.Xdefaults I added this line: Xft.dpi: 96.
Just because I prefer a minimal desktop is no sign I have no use for added toys. Recently, a host of excellent addons for Firefox have helped me move away from the heavier desktop environments. The Accuweather plugin keeps me informed of weather conditions, which change frequently, and sometimes dramatically, here in Central Oklahoma. And while there is at least one good console calendar application, I prefer something with simpler configurations for appointment reminders. The Lightening plugin for Thunderbird fills the bill for me. I did try Evolution briefly, but there are two major flaws no one seems willing to fix. First is the longstanding keyring bug, popping up and demanding a password every time you check your email accounts. This happens only if you aren’t running the GNOME desktop, though the problem is actually quite convoluted. I can run Thunderbird without that sort of hassle. The other issue is Evolution won’t allow me to check individual accounts. It’s all or nothing. This is simply wrong-headed design, and I find it inexcusable.
There are a few other issues. I can’t imagine why the GNOME screensaver settings doesn’t include the full range of power controls. This is a step back from the original Xscreensaver, which I use with IceWM. I still prefer Elinks and Lynx over W3m. I compiled the latest version of Elinks unstable, and it is a real treat, having finally gotten rid of “ghost text” artifacts on pages which implement character set encoding poorly. My learning disability (Adult ADD) requires I avoid using the graphical browsers when possible. I’m not thrilled with the loss of Nedit from the SUSE repositories. That is, you can get earlier versions by source RPM, but not the latest. And I suppose it didn’t help the Nedit team for so long required an obsolete Motif library, and didn’t build well on 64-bit nor PPC. I’m told the latest CSV for Nedit is better, but it’s still not included in the standard repositories. I tested the community contribution package on openSUSE 11.0, but there were serious problems with cut-n-paste. That was my favorite graphical editor for just plain text files. Fortunately, I still have Joe on the Xterm.
No two of us will find our needs met in precisely the same way with any Linux distribution. No two of us will ever work alike, and it does no good to pretend anyone can review a new release with any significant meaning for the masses. So far, after less than 24 hours of fairly normal use, I’m happy with what I have in openSUSE 11.1. There are no show-stoppers, and all the hiccups are tolerable. I suppose most users would not run into the issues I have, but by the same token, I rather doubt this is quite perfect and polished enough to convert any Windows users en masse. It would require some hand-holding from a more experienced Linux user, but so would any Windows installation. The only hope any Linux evangelist has is one-on-one promotion, with a concerted effort to keep offering that support until the new user can stand on his own. Yet, we already know most Windows users don’t bother to find solutions themselves, so only a small slice of any potential market will ever migrate.
