MY Life without Windows or OS X

OpenSuSE is one of oldest Linux distributions around. Originally SuSE Linux was owned by a German company by the same name. But in January 2004, it was acquired by Novell which continued to further develop and include more SuSE specific features to it. The end result is was an OS which has come into its own. OpenSuSE is a community program that was sponsored by Novell and had been developed into an open model. Late in 2010 Novell was acquired by Attachmate,for $2.2 billion. The deal included Novell's SUSE Linux, which Attachmate plans to build a a separate business unit with.

Back in 2007 I came across a DVD of OpenSuSE 10.2. At the time I was using Linspire Five-O, PC Linux OS and Linux Mint, 3 pretty nice GNU/Linux distributions. However unlike those guys, out of the box, openSUSE did support proprietary video codecs or encrypted DVDs. You had to add an unofficial repository. By default OpenSuSE had a choice between KDE and Gnome and one could choose one over the other at the time of installation. I picked KDE. Then there was YaST (Yet another Setup Tool ). It was a unique tool found which allowed one to do all the system administration tasks from within its GUI interface which includes package management. With YaST I could do almost all system maintenance and network administration tasks but it was kind of slow for my taste. YaST GUI refreshed the repository databases automatically each time it is opened. Updates were slow at times, particularly during installation. But OpenSUSE performed very well for me. I didn’t have any system crashes or other noticeable problems.

Then openSUSE 10.2 reached its end-of-life on December 16th, 2008. With YAST's poor performance, OpenSUSE 10.3 not making any significant improvement and with Linspie on its way out. I bought a Dell inspiron 1420n laptop with Ubuntu 7.10. My desktop was Mandriva power pack 2008.

Fast-forward to May of 2012.

SUSE is back in the form of 11.04. I hear it is good. I will post again when I fine out.....