A while back, I played around with openSUSE via live CD on both my desktop and laptops. I had been meaning to pen a review down, but never played too much with the distribution before I wanted to return to Ubuntu. Before anyone shoots me for being an “Ubuntu fanatic”, let me make it clear… I like Ubuntu, but after the sloppy dist-upgrade from Feisty (perfect) to Gutsy (rushed, maybe) and how it broke lots of things, I am leery on saying I am a “die-hard” fan of Ubuntu.

Disclaimer: This is not a “full” review, take this quick review for what it is worth.

Novell has been more of an enterprise/corporate player in the grand scheme of Linux and network related technologies. Many have probably used corporate machines powered by Novell NetWare for Windows for example. For the folks who are looking for a very tight corporate office set-up but powered by open source software, Novell has the SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop package that they market with a choice of varied years for tech support. Novell’s project openSUSE, however, is more like an open playground for enthusiasts, fans, and developers to join together and help push SUSE Linux further in developments.

One thing that Novell did right for the 10.3 release is that they packaged the distribution with live CD versions as well. Ever since Ubuntu and its other flavors had live CD’s to give potential new users a try rather than forcing a user to install to see, a lot of distributions lost ground. To see Novell do this gave me much more incentive to give the distro a try as I don’t have a machine to wipe and test. I would pull both the KDE and Gnome versions from their http server and fire them up on CD-R’s to test them out.

The boot procedure is nice and quick on both versions and the environments load up without any delay. After all the initial processes loaded, I was greeted with a rather friendly green and silver themed desktop. The set-up is very akin to Windows XP and that’s to both the KDE and Gnome environments. The Gnome environment has Novell’s custom “Gnome SLAB” for the interface that makes the Gnome experience very much like a Windows one for the ease of transition.

The clean set-up is impressive to say the least. The menus are intuitive and a user could quickly get oriented with little instruction. The live CD comes with the bare basics, so things like Open Office, a media player, etc are all there. The system is also armed with Novell’s App Armor which is more like a GUI powered form of SELinux. So a great experience with security in mind. What’s there not to love?

My only bit with openSUSE is that YAST (the application grabber) is horridly slow. It’s not a efficient as apt (on Debian based distros) and the server checks take serious time. I just got a bit fed up with it and just quit bothering with it. The rest of the distro is quick… but YAST is a serious buzz kill for me. I know that you can throw on an apt system for openSUSE, but it’s not without it’s own hoops and ladders.

For people looking for a nicely polished up distro for business and work, openSUSE is a great distro to get your feet wet before plunking down the cash for SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). The quality polish on it is refined and could easily fool Windows users at an office as a skin for Windows. With safeguards there to protect end users from being exploited from App Armor, it could really ease headaches for those aiming to be an at-home sys-admin. YAST is the Achilles heel of the distribution, but it has gotten better than when I played with SUSE Linux 9.3 a few years back.