Other than the ridiculous SLAB menu (which reminds me way too much of the Fisher-Price Windows menu and there seems to be no way to use a plain one), openSUSE isn’t bad…unless you have to change a configuration that requires root access, or install software. I used to think Synaptic was a little slow to load (certainly it’s slower than apt-get), but Synaptic has nothing on YaST. In under 4s after I hit Enter, Synaptic can display 23 454 packages from universe, multiverse and a couple of custom repos. YaST doesn’t list the number of packages, but the only sources I have enabled are the installation DVD and the official OSS repos from SUSE, and it takes 18s after hitting Enter for it to come up with the list. Each time I open YaST, it has to scan each source, then another scan to update, and finally, it will display results. I also don’t like the fact that (apparently) there’s no readily available equivalent to multiverse because that means I can’t disable the DVD as a potential source. If I do, then I have only the OSS software available to me, which isn’t much help if I want to install something like Acrobat, which I actually had to do because for some reason, I couldn’t get a particular PDF to display correctly in Evince. I was in bed (wanting to read the PDF) and didn’t want to get up to retrieve the installation DVD, but YaST couldn’t look for it anywhere except the DVD, or the OSS repos (where it isn’t because it’s not OSS). SUSE enterprise might be different, but I’d have to pay for that, and part of the reason I like Linux is because I can change distros at will without spending hundreds of dollars on it. I did somehow manage to shove Acrobat 8.0 down its throat (7.0 was on the DVD, found an rpm of 8.0 on Adobe’s site), but it wasn’t anywhere near as easy as it would have been on Ubuntu. I wasn’t even sure it had installed, so I had to fire up YaST and look in the list (18 seconds of my life that I’ll never get back). If I download a deb, all I have to do to install it is click (once, ’cause that’s the way I have Nautilus set). Gdebi will ask for my password, and open a nice little window with an Install button. If there are any potential problems, it’ll tell me, but won’t refuse to install if I want to go ahead in spite of that.

I like openSUSE as far as using it, but that’s because it has Gnome, which is my preferred DE. I do not like YaST, not one bit. It’s slow and clunky, and if you want to install a bunch of software, you might want to do them all at once without closing YaST because otherwise, you could spend hours waiting for it to figure out what software is available to you. I don’t like SLAB because I know what application I want to use and I don’t need a task-based interface. Also, it drives me BATSHIT that the panel entry says, “Computer” with a little icon of a monitor. Goddamn it, I know I’m using a computer, and I know what the menu does. Why can’t I have the little SUSE chameleon instead? Ubuntu default has something similar (Menu Bar, though not as huge and clunky as SLAB), but all I have to do is “Remove from panel” and replace with a Main Menu, which has a cute little Ubuntu icon (or a Gnome foot for some themes), and a neat little list of everything I need, which I can customise with Alacarte. For that matter, if you actually like the SLAB menu (though I can’t imagine why anyone would), you can install that on Ubuntu, either manually or with Automatix. I’d switch the laptop to Ubuntu (or Mint or something), but this is the first time I’ve had all three computers working properly on the network (still have to figure out why I couldn’t get fstab umask 003 to work for my FAT32 partition), and I want to keep it for a while before I change something that breaks it. Not that I mind breaking stuff, but I would like to have it functioning for a little while. Who knows–maybe I’ll learn to like at least SLAB, if not that goddamned slow-ass YaST. 🙂

P.S. To SUSE’s credit, I did just now discover that they made available the international clock applet for the panel, and it is available for Ubuntu. Yaaaay for multiple time zones!

P.P.S. Yay for Geek Girl–I just found the option to get rid of that goddamned huge idiot-menu!!