I’m actually glad I decided to install openSUSE 11.0 because….YaST is usable! If it’s significantly slower than Synaptic, I can’t tell, and since I enabled Packman and a couple of other community repos in addition to the official ones, I was able to install Skype and aMSN without having to install dependencies package-by-package. All I’ve installed besides those so far is Epiphany, and I think that was on the DVD anyway, but it should at least be easier. Oh! I did install the “neutral” cursor theme, and this time, the package install didn’t crash. Even Samba was no trouble to get working, though I did decide this time to use SSH to communicate between the Linux systems and will use Samba only for stuff I want to share with XP. SSH is much faster, takes a matter of 30 seconds to log in, and gives access to the whole /home (if I want it to), not just the directories I have shared with Samba (XP doesn’t need access to everything). Someday, I will build a proper file server, but for now, at least I can get to my stuff no matter where it is or which OS I’m using on which computer. I guess I really do like openSUSE, and now that YaST isn’t such a pig, and I remembered that I could enable community repos, it’s much better. I still like Ubuntu better, but that’s probably because I’m more used to it and therefore more proficient with it. I guess it’s probably a good idea to use a couple of different distros so I don’t get stuck in a rut and forget that “new and different” doesn’t mean “OMG!!!111” That’s Windows user mentality. 😉

Oh, yeah…and for all the bitching I’ve read about Ubuntu’s using PulseAudio, this version of openSUSE does, too, and it works just as well as it does on my Ubuntu system. I don’t give a rat’s arse what they say about how wonderful OSS is; I never could get that to work properly, and didn’t have reliable sound until ALSA. I don’t yet quite understand how PulseAudio works with ALSA (acts as a sound server to allow volume-by-application?), but it works well enough to suit me. 😀