Ian’s Blog

Since I found Windows XP so distasteful, I thought I’d give the fresh OpenSUSE 11.0 with KDE4 a try in its stead.

My first impressions thus far are alright. I don’t know why so many Linux distributions are jumping on the KDE4 bandwagon before it’s really a user-ready platform, but they are. OpenSUSE 11.0 KDE4 is running KDE 4.0.4. While I like the default theme a lot, Plasma in this particular release is crashier than I like. It crashed three times while installing from the LiveCD, doing simple things like resizing widgets or hitting the “show desktop” widget.

UPDATE: Using the Build Service-provided YMP (available at the link as KDE4-BASIS.YMP), I managed to install KDE 4.00.82, a development version which already enjoys significant improvements over KDE 4.0.4. Plasma is stabler; the panel configuration is much more blingy, easier to use and it configures more; the theme has been updated to be even nicer and those horrible generic icon widgets have been replaced with folderview- which I will happily leave off my desktop in favor of more useful widgets.

My display resolution is, as with apparently any operating system, not detected correctly on the first boot. While my display is 1440×900, and xorg.conf agrees, xrandr reports my configured resolution as 1440 x 960. Using xrandr -s 1440x900 sets the resolution correctly but made my bottom panel disappear. Literally, it just went away. Re-adding a panel and setting it to the bottom of the screen worked fine, but it’s a bit of a WTF.

UPDATE: xrandr’s changes didn’t stick. Poking around in the SaX2 configuration tool, I realized that it claimed my monitor was one-tenth of an inch smaller than it is. Setting it to the correct size has remedied OpenSUSE’s resolution problems.

nano, my favorite text-mode text editor, was not installed by default. Hoping to enjoy the much-vaunted improved speed of the OpenSUSE package-management system, zypper, I ran zypper install nano.

The installation itself was certainly lightning-quick, but the first run took the time to reload the repositories (which was a lengthy process, though better than on other systems). Thankfully, subsequent usage of zypper is faster than any other package manager I’ve ever used- save, perhaps, SliTaz’s tazpkg.

When it comes to applications, OpenSUSE seems to come with the usual suspects- OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Amarok 1.4, those kinds of things.

Frustratingly for a nitpicky user like me, not all the applications bundled with OpenSUSE 11.0 KDE4 have been ported to KDE4 yet- so they stand out like a sore thumb. Some essential applications- like Konqueror- have been ported, but others- like YaST- have not (Read the update below before passing comment!). They still work but it’s not as visually pleasing as it would be if it were all KDE4.

UPDATE: I know that YaST was ported to QT4; nevertheless, both the installer and the YaST that got installed from the KDE4 LiveCD looked exactly like they were in QT3 and I saw none of the tacky widget theming that I saw demoed in screenshots on Planet SUSE, except on the first-boot config screen.

Overall, everything seems fine so far. Some little problems related to the fact that KDE4 isn’t really done yet, but otherwise I’m pleased.