Felipe Alvarez's blog

openSUSE was released on July 15th. I downloaded the 32-bit DVD today, because I wanted to try the new LXDE Desktop that is included with the disk (thanks to Andreas for making that effort!). It is currently being test driven on VirtualBox on openSUSE 11.2, and MAN is it ever FAST! It’s probably the 1.5GB RAM upgrade I made only a month ago that is adding significant performance boost to the Guest OS on Virtualbox, but the LXDE desktop seems so fluid, so beautiful. A little XFCE-like, but I’m definately going to spend a little more time toying with this desktop.

I highly recommend openSUSE as a total and complete operating system. It is very easy to use, and causes little fuss. The 8-month development cycle means that you can see a new release at least twice a year, but at different times of the year. The additional two months means that more time goes into bug squashing which will lead to a more solid release. Fedora and Ubuntu, two very large distributions, are, like openSUSE, backed by multi-million dollar corporations. Those distros release religiously every six months, which I find unnecessarily quick.

openSUSE operates using the popular RPM package format, strickly adheres to the LSB (Linux Standard Base) something like SUS (Single Unix Specification) or POSIX, except for GNU/Linux distributions. openSUSE has [at least] 4 very stable and solid popular desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and now LXDE). That doesn’t include the desktops that aren’t found on the DVD but can be found in the [un]official repositories.