Thread: OpenSUSE

OpenSUSE is another one of those distros with a long history, the first version having come out in 1994. SUSE was originally meant to be a commercial, open source, distro. In terms of usage, SUSE for commercial use comes in second only to Red Hat. Novell took over the company a decade later, in 2004, maintaining and providing support to several SUSE editions.

OpenSUSE is the edition which is free for public use. There are enterprise and server editions also available. OpenSUSE is well known for being one of the most actively maintained distros around, with around four OpenSUSE releases every year. The
current version is OpenSUSE 11.1. There are CD and DVD versions available, the CD version having an office suite, some image editing suits, and both KDE and GNOME available as desktop environment choices, with a few windows managers
thrown in for good measure.

However, setting up OpenSUSE and installing it is not terribly easy, and is one of the more frustrating experiences around. To start with, as OpenSUSE is a commercially backed distro, similar to Ubuntu, the codecs don't come in with the distro. For the more common codecs, this is not too much of an effort after installation, but for the more obscure codecs, it becomes a pain to set them up.

OpenSUSE is a great general purpose distribution, is frequently updated, and has a great community around it for any kind of support that users may want. SUSE has a large and comprehensive repository, and almost every software for Linux out there has a build for the latest SUSE version.

Parts of the Novell team working on SUSE, also work on KDE and GNOME. The distribution usually has the latest versions of the desktop environments in its releases, and is a widely used distro, particularly in India. If you have a decent internet connection, OpenSUSE should pose no real problems as long as you are willing to take time to figure things out, and have the patience to work with a distro that gives very little out of the box. For power users, with limited space on their laptops, this is a very good choice, as OpensUsE does not clutter the installation with unnecessary packages. There are a wide range of .iso files available on the sUsE website for OpensUSE. You can download GNOME or KDE only ISOs from the OpensUS website, as well as a MiniCD version of OpensUSE.