I want…
Two hours of my life and 4GB of DVD space back. OpenSUSE 11 is absolutely horrible and don’t let anyone else tell you differently. It would not recognize my second monitor with “Auto Configuration” and would freeze every time it tried launching KDE4. Now I’m not one to say Plug and Play and Auto Configuration is the way to go. I actually prefer editing config files and tweaking them to best optimization, but if you’re going to offer it, get your shit right. Oh, and on that subject, KDE4 sucks. No matter how fancy and polished it looks in all these screenshots you see on random sites it just doesn’t look and “feel” that way in person. It still feels unresponsive to me.
The reason I installed OpenSUSE 11 on my desktop is because Arch64 was becoming a headache. First FF3 would start crashing on random sites (not just sites with flash embedded) but any site at any time. Next Rhythmbox would act up, freeze and also become unresponsive. I thought OpenSUSE would be a respectable distro that offered tons of packages and would be perfect for the desktop… I guess not. All I want is a nice distro that is optimized for 64bit architecture and won’t become a hassle.
I’m left with three choices…
A ) Resort back to i686 Archlinux
B ) Give Ubuntu a try as my main desktop OS (Yeah crazy thought huh?)
C ) Say screw all this and run both their parent distro Debian
I know a lot of people out there, including myself would consider Ubuntu as the “Intro” or “Gateway” to the linux world. Once you got your feet wet and understood how Linux operated you would then move on to bigger and better distros where you can customize everything to your liking (meaning not everything is installed out of the box). I’m starting to realize that possible, just maybe Ubuntu can be the OSX of Linux distros. I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to say. Maybe the hardcore tech heads and hackers shouldn’t be scared to use a distro such as Ubuntu?
Another thought that I find myself revisiting is the fact that I don’t have old, slow, and crappy hardware anymore. I know I always used to be worried about performance and would cut fat but either running fluxbox or XFCE (which I still love regardless) but why not take advantage of the hardware and run a full blown Gnome + Compiz-Fusion desktop. I’m sure my Intel Q6600 (4x2.4GHz), 3GB RAM, and 8300GS can handle the eye candy and then some. I guess I still have the mentality of the old school hacker where all I need is the CLI to take control of my box, which still holds true. I mean I use the CLI about 60-70% of the time while on my Linux boxes, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt embracing the future and taking the same mentality along with it.
Yeah, if you haven’t noticed, it definitely turned into a rant. I’m sure a couple of my friends reading this will understand me as well and can see where I’m coming from. It’s one of the main reasons I went with Apple and used a MBP with OSX for about 4 or 5 months. It’s still a very secure OS being backed by BSD and I’m my opinion has the best looking desktop environment out there. Apple is just too damn expensive and that’s a whole different story in itself but that’s why I came back to the good old open source desktop.
