back to article OpenSUSE 12.3: Proof not all Linux PCs are Um Bongo-grade bonkers

The openSUSE project is back on track. This week version 12.3 of the Linux operating system distribution was unleashed, right on time, as a free download. This will be seen as good news after the organisational restructuring and delays that plagued the release of openSUSE 12.2 last year. While 12.2 was delayed, it was worth …

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nice upgrade but.......

        I've used plenty of Nvidia card and plenty of ATI cards and I know which have given me the most grief under Linux over the years and it certainly isn't Nvidia. I will say one thing ATI don't make the worst graphics chips, that honour goes to the useless twats at S3 graphics who make the most stinking IGP chips ever known to man.

        PS Linus throws his toys out of the pram if the custard is a bit too cold or a bit too hot.

    1. eulampios

      @Nvidia vs. AMD

      Quite the opposite experience: Nvidia proprietary support is totally f@#ed up, free radeon drivers (as of recent since AMD had straightened things out) are very nice. In particular, disappearing mouse, reliable suspend/resume, Xserver memory leaks and no KMS.

      Well, with AMD cards and the free radeon driver, if things don't work well on a kernel of some version , chances are high that things will improve or get fixed on the kernel of higher versions, which you can easily get and build (or download for Ubuntu system). As a comparison, with Nvidia you gotta suck up and hope they will deign to fix it ..soon. And thanks to Nvidia (and AMD), nouveau is l.y.'s ahead of radeon

      1. The Serpent

        Re: @Nvidia vs. AMD

        That has been my experience too. I can recall hours jiggling nvidia stuff, often in vain hope (mobile chipsets in particular), but no real problems with ATI/AMD

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nice upgrade but.......

      Install Windows then, not some amateur written OS intended for hobbyists.

      You'll find all the driver support you need with a professional OS.

      1. eulampios

        patching AC

        patching an incorrect statement:

        --Install Windows then, not some amateur written OS intended for hobbyists.

        ++Install Windows then, to see how amateur written OS is intended.

        #Fixed

      2. Cipher

        Re: Nice upgrade but.......

        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nice upgrade but.......

        "Install Windows then, not some amateur written OS intended for hobbyists."

        The "hobbyist" line is used by better MS employees everywhere. Can't you guys insert a little original thought in your posts? Or does Redmond have a script you must follow?

        "You'll find all the driver support you need with a professional OS."

        Not having any problems with Mint, in fact the install took care of everything. 1998 is calling, you should answer that phone....

        the J to the C

        "Linux as a desktop is a failure, its time to move on"

        Your perceptions and wishes do not equal reality.

        "Really guys, its over, will someone tell the others, as a server, it has lots of merits"

        It freakin' rules the server world, far beyond "lots of merits...

        "but a desktop OS it is an. utter failure."

        Works fine for me, and many others I suspect...

        " its been fun to play with but today I dont have a linux build working and dont see a place for it as a desktop OS. Mac OS or Windows pick one and do something rather that fix the OS"

        Try some of the help forums, just like windows users do when it eventually breaks on them. There are thousands of people seeking Windows help everyday because it doesn't always "just work."

        People who know what they're doing help them, and Linux users will help you. I am sorry you cannot seem to get a major distro to work. makes me wonder how you would do if handed a blank computer and had to install windows on it the same way. Probably be beyond your reach as well...

    3. Davidoff
      Headmaster

      Re: The wankers at AMD decided that HD4XXX or below is now legacy...

      "...and we are going to give fuck all support on a chipset that they were flogging only a year or so ago."

      No, they weren't. The Radeon HD 4000 Series came out 2008 and is out of production since somewhere in 2010.

      Of course that doesn't make their decision to move them to legacy support any better, which is stupid considering Nvidia still supports the Geforce 8 Series which came out 2006 and that cards like the 4870 or 4890 still play latest games at HD resolution just fine.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The wankers at AMD decided that HD4XXX or below is now legacy... @davidoff

        Yes the chips may have gone out of production in 2010 but cards and mobile systems were still being sold by 2011 as stock went out of the supply chain. I don't think 5 years support from ceasing production is unreasonable if they insist on closed source drivers . Do bear in mind this also applies to the windows drivers as they are going nowhere either.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nice upgrade but.......

      Hardly anyone uses Linux though - why should AMD bother?

  1. Gary Heard
    Thumb Up

    Just gets better

    I've used openSUSE as my main OS for about 4 years, using MS windows (when I need to ) in a VM. I've seen good and bad releases, this one looks good, installed it on the desktop yesterday and it "just worked". Looks very good in KDE mode, haven't tested Gnome yet, or put it on the laptop. Will back EVERYTHING up before the laptop upgrade, better safe than sorry

    I'm impressed that they have recovered from the problems of last year with what looks to be a very professional polished upgrade

  2. Tom_B
    Thumb Up

    KDE Is beautiful

    Having recently decided to have a play with desktop Linux again for the first time in about 5 years, and installed Linux Mint. I must say I'm impressed. I only had to edit xorg.conf once and that was because I was trying to get a windows game working under WINE. Everything just worked.

    And KDE. Wow! It really puts the nonsense UI of Windows 8 to shame. I'm hugely impressed with KDE as a desktop these days. Back in the 3.* days it always felt a bit clunky and looked like it was designed in about 1991 but the most recent version is tremendous.

    If I can get photoshop and itunes working successfully I'll certainly be switching to Linux as my primary OS!

    1. exanime
      Thumb Up

      Re: KDE Is beautiful

      I had always been wary of KDE because people claimed it was too bloated and I was running very standard hardware but then a Phoronix article which actually claimed KDE was the fastest desktop once special effects were turned off (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1210beta_desktops&num=6) so I decided to give it a try... and I haven't looked back

      It looks super cool, you can do ANYTHING with it (actually sometimes there are just too many options, at times I wonder "who the hell would want to turn x, y, or z on or off?" "why did they bother?"

      I can't run it on my ancient netbook but otherwise it's my weapon of choice

  3. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
    Facepalm

    You missed the

    important question hanging on everyones lips

    "Does it run the steam native client with no hassle?"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: You missed the

      Dunno, seen it in the repos. Can't tell you if it's any good though as I was banned by my Wife from games playing under threat of divorce.

      1. Marcelo Rodrigues
        Joke

        Re: You missed the

        Won't You miss her?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Thumb Up

          Re: You missed the @ Marcelo Rodrigues

          Like it :)

          1. ChrisM

            Re: You missed the @ Marcelo Rodrigues

            Will it run steam....

            Whay don't you just come out and say 'will it run crysis?'

      2. Will Stephenson

        Re: You missed the

        Ditto, simply for observing that Day Of Defeat was now available for Linux.

    2. Will Stephenson
      Go

      Re: You missed the

      Yes, it's in the opensuse games addon repo:

      http://blog.seader.us/2013/03/running-steam-on-opensuse-123.html

  4. Blue eyed boy
    Boffin

    Have they finally fixed

    the KNode drag/drop bug?

    1. Will Stephenson

      Re: Have they finally fixed

      I and my colleagues on the openSUSE team haven't. Upstream KDE might have, but I don't know which bug you mean. Is it one of these: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=knode%20drag%20drop&list_id=553813 ?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Sniff

    I was a Suse user from v5.1, and I've been tempted to go back now that kde is where it's at. But I'm fond of jfs as a file system, which for some reason Suse stopped supprting some time back. Glad they're back on track though and putting the Novell years behind them.

    1. Morten Bjoernsvik
      FAIL

      Re: Sniff

      >But I'm fond of jfs as a file system, which for some reason Suse stopped supprting some time back.

      JFS is in the 12.3 filesystem list, it is not the default though which is ext4, I myself always uses XFS.

      I've had lots of cheap disks failing, but I've always managed to get xfs_repair to restore the disk into a readable condition. much faster than Spinrite.

  6. Cipher
    Happy

    Suse Studio

    I really like and appreciate what they're doing with this. You can roll your distro from their web site.

    Many options, desktop, reps, packages, etc.

    http://susestudio.com/

    1. phil dude
      Thumb Up

      Re: Suse Studio

      The whole openbuild environment is extremely impressive. Especially when you want to hack/build a package without installing everything on your home machine.

      I too moved to Suse some time back, originally as a Redhat refugee , but mostly because we have it everywhere at work, and I have 6 desktops around the world, that all look that same...!

      If there becomes a way to run android apps on a normal opensuse desktop (not Vbox), I would say we had reached a nice state of being...

      P.

  7. mattymil
    Thumb Up

    Not bad at all

    I beta tested the gnome version last week. Performance was far better than my Arch or Ubuntu installs.

  8. Valeyard
    Unhappy

    Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

    ...oh to be that young and naive again, where the butterflies land on the tulips and the nvidia drivers frolic hand in hand with opensuse

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

      Try Windows. 100% support, 100% of the time. Leave these hobbyists to their amateur tinkering.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

        "Try Windows. 100% support, 100% of the time. Leave these hobbyists to their amateur tinkering"

        Try Windows. 0% support, 100% of the time. Leave these hobbyists to get on with it !

        Evening RICHTO/Vogon/Whatever......

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

          How droll. Clearly written by someone who thinks partially working hardware is normal or doesn't mind selecting from a restricted list. The truth is that every OEM and service (e.g. Netflix, AMD, Broadcom...) supports Windows, almost none support Linux.

          And there are two reasons for that. You want it all for free. A business paying professionals, providing quality software AND support cannot last long on free. Which is why professional organisations avoid you,.

          Oh yeah, and your sub 1% market share. And there's a reason for that too; your antiquated UI. A CLI! How cute. The1960s called, they want their paradigm back.

          This is wether someone says you don't need to see the CLI on Linux, to which I says bullshit. If you look at any tutorial (assuming you network card actually works) you'll see the CLI. That's game over in the real world .

          Fail on freetard, fail on.

          1. Chemist

            Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

            "The truth is that every OEM and service (e.g. Netflix, AMD, Broadcom...) supports Windows, almost none support Linux.

            Broadcom : http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

            Intel : http://www.intel.com/support/wireless/sb/cs-006408.htm

            AMD : http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx

            NVIDIA : http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

            Even your beloved Microsoft is contributing to the kernel.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

              "AMD : http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx"

              Ha ha ha ha! Nice try freetard. Go and tell this user about how great AMD's support is.

              http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/1762795

              1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
                Devil

                Muah...

                MUAH.

                AC trollposts about Linux, injects hostility, fakes aggravated fanboism for Windows and hopes for a shitstorm?

                Here?

                Where using "professionalism" and "Microsoft" in the same phrase evokes tired guffaws?

                Go back to /b/, anon.

          2. Chemist

            Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

            "you look at any tutorial (assuming you network card actually works) you'll see the CLI"

            Are you sure ? That's a rhetorical question actually as I know that you are not.

            Try http://linux.about.com/od/linux101/a/desktop14.htm

        2. vagabondo

          Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

          @Anonymous Coward Saturday 16th March 2013 22:20 GMT

          Why did you do that? It was good to see the troll being totally ignored. I made it about 11hours from the first troll without any response, comment or vote.

          1. vagabondo

            Re: @Anonymous Coward Saturday 16th March 2013 22:20 GMT

            Or maybe you are the troll, trying to prompt a response to yourself?

          2. Chemist

            Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

            "It was good to see the troll being totally ignored"

            It was but as you see I answered almost certainly the same one below. The reason is simple, experienced users of Linux know he's a troll, interested onlookers might actually believe some of the garbage spouted.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

              "The reason is simple, experienced users of Linux know he's a troll, interested onlookers might actually believe some of the garbage spouted."

              Apart from the fact it's the truth. Linux is a world of pain, suffering, poor support and editing arcane config files in the vain hope that it might start working (want to share a folder? In Windows it's right-click, "Share", done. In Linux? Well, first you need to edit smbd.conf...far from simple...then restart smbd..init.d?...upstart?...systemd?...back to the poorly written docs...maybe nmbd too...and pray...then find that name resoltuion isn't working...so back to smbd...try a few more times...two hours later your share might be working...or maybe not).

              Linux might be OK for hobbyists, but not in the real world. In the real world people want to get things done, not masturbate over command line switches.

              1. Chemist

                Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

                "want to share a folder?"

                As it happens although I don't normally need Samba being all Linux so use NFS , my wife needed access to the fileserver for her Nexus 7 and Android phone. As the filemanager we'd installed on the Androids needed Samba I set it up on the fileserver. It took a handful of clicks. on the YAST GUI to get it working.

        3. TheVogon
          Mushroom

          Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

          Not me, I only just got around to this thread. Not quite correct too - Enterprise support is after all available for SUSE. It just costs more than to license Windows...

          1. vagabondo

            Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

            @TheVogon

            Enterprise support is after all available for SUSE. It just costs more than to license Windows.

            May cost more than the MS licences. Apples and oranges. Compare with the cost of MS support. Then compare the costs of openSUSE licences with MS licences.

  9. Barry Rueger

    Eh? Wifi?

    Burned it to a DVD, stuffed it in and rebooted.

    This is the first distro in a very long time that didn't automagically find my wireless card and allow me to set up my network in a couple of seconds.

    I'm surprised. I spent ten minutes poking around looking for the right place to fix the settings, but never succeeded.

    Eject DVD and back into Mint.

    That said, the KDE environment looked very cool and useful, and I MIGHT try it as an alternative to my current Mint install.

    1. Chemist

      Re: Eh? Wifi?

      You might have run foul of this problem :

      http://lizards.opensuse.org/2013/03/13/one-that-got-away-12-3-networking/

    2. Paul 135

      Re: Eh? Wifi?

      I'd hazard a guess that you have a Broadcom WiFi chip set. See here:

      http://opensuse-guide.org/wlan.php

      1. Paul 135

        Re: Eh? Wifi?

        Sorry, wrong link. Meant this one for WiFi issues:

        http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Wireless_network_card

    3. Barry Rueger

      Re: Eh? Wifi?

      FWIW, tried running it from USB instead of a DVD and everything is just fine. Odd bug that.

      I'm liking the KDE a LOT, and am seriously thinking of changing over from Mint.

  10. the J to the C
    FAIL

    Linux as a desktop is a failure, its time to move on

    Really guys, its over, will someone tell the others, as a server, it has lots of merits but a desktop OS it is an. utter failure. I have been around the block a few times with Linux had a love hate relationship from the start but the main requirement of a OS has never been met by Linux in all it's variants, that is to make things work and then get out of the way. I dont care about the OS just want I want to do with it, how many of us think I know I want to rebuild my OS to allow it to run this app or used that hardware. its been fun to play with but today I dont have a linux build working and dont see a place for it as a desktop OS. Mac OS or Windows pick one and do something rather that fix the OS

    1. Barry Rueger

      Re: Linux as a desktop is a failure, its time to move on

      I call BS. Three years on Ubuntu/Mint with negligible problems. I was, and arguably still am a Windows ace, and have been up to my elbows in the guts of the thing. I also ran a Mac for several years. I would not go back.

      I've got Photoshop humming along nicely in WINE, and the one thing that won't run under Linux (QuickBooks) is happy in a Vista Virtual machine. Otherwise I use 90% what came preinstalled, plus Chrome and a couple of other things that amount to personal preference.

      Stuff Just Works. Every time. With significantly less virus alarms, update demands, reboots and pre-installed dreckware that seems to be part of the Windows world.

      Unless you have some very specific demands that specifically require a Windows or Mac software package, there's no reason why 98% of the world can't get by very, very well with Linux on on the desktop.

      1. Chemist

        Re: Linux as a desktop is a failure, its time to move on

        "Stuff Just Works."

        Agree entirely. I've used SUSE & OpenSUSE for years at home, certainly since SUSE 5.0, and I've used RH at work again for years.

        Installation on a wide variety of hardware has generally been trouble free even years ago and these days I'd no more expect to have a problem than I would expect to compile the kernel or use the CLI for installation. (I notice one of the usual troublemakers is spreading that FUD at the moment and in doing so is displaying the depths of his ignorance)

        OpenSUSE is my only desktop these days and I also use it on my file/odds&sods/proxy server. 3 machines of 6 have wireless networking which never gives a problem ( and I travel a lot with a laptop or netbook and connect to all manner of access points ). I have a NVidia accelerated graphics card on one machine that I do 1080p/50 video editing on, scanner/printer and laser printer, webcam, RAW photo processing.

        1. TheVogon
          Mushroom

          Re: Linux as a desktop is a failure, its time to move on

          "Stuff Just Works." - So Linux is finally getting more like Windows in terms of driver support, app availability, fixing its security problems (to a degree), games (well a few), usability (via the GUI anyway), etc.

          However there is no compelling reason for the average Joe Public to switch - and for that reason it doesn't ever look likely to succeed in taking a significant market share.

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