OpenSUSE: Simply the best.

I have been using Linux for my home desktop exclusively now for 2 years. I have always had a version of Linux on my system since the days of 0.92 kernel (remember Slackware in the red multi-cd box?) , but I always felt it was not mature enough until 2 years ago.

My distribution of choice has always been Suse. I have tried several others but as I have discovered they all have minor problems that were show stoppers.

Last week I went out and bought a top of the line PC, my first "high-end" ever. I always stayed a generation or two back, to be on the safe side. This time however I wanted something big, fast and with lots of goodies. So I bought an Intel Core Duo 2 at 45nm running at 3.16Ghz, the fastest CPU by Intel bellow their Extreme series,a fairly good ASUS motherboard with 4gb of Ram (2x2gb) and an NVidia GeForce 8800GT video card.

I had also decided to try a different distribution and see if there has been much improvement, and since the day I bought the new PC, Fedora 9 came out, I downloaded it and tested it.

It booted in the installer, checked the media, I chose a volume setup I liked and I told it to install everything. 20 minutes into the installation it failed and all I could do was stop the installation or report a bug and stop the installation!

Ok... Second try.

This time install only the basic system. Install finished in under 10 minutes and I rebooted. Entered a root password and created a user account and then I got to a black screen and the system stopped responding!

I tried several BIOS settings, since it seemed to be a hardware problem, some twicking of the xorg.conf file to use a failsafe video mode (using the cd to boot to repair mode) but to no avail. It didn't work.

Ok... I remembered I had an Ubuntu 8.04 live CD somewhere. Found it and booted. It worked fine. The installer worked and everything seemed fine.

So it was time to install the NVidia drivers. It seems though that the hardware configuration was too much for Ubuntu. Although the driver installed fine, XServer refused to use it and always used the open source non-accelerated driver. Twicking the gdm didn't work. Also I discovered that some standard runlevel commands like init don't work in Ubuntu.

Finally I decided to use OpenSUSE, which has worked great in the past for me on all my systems. OpenSUSE 10.3 is the latest stable version and it is older than both Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 so I had little hope it would work. However it worked great. Installed without a hitch. Updated with no problems, recognized all my hardware and finally the NVidia driver installed correctly and 3d acceleration was tested with Quake Wars Enemy Territory .

Don't get me wrong. I have seen Fedora 9 work great, I just have never been able to install it on any of my systems that usually have weird or exotic hardware. Ubuntu? I use it on my media pc, a pc made from a barebone system, that sits under my 32" Samsung TV. However it seems non of the are good enough for my new system.

No I am sure I can make them both work fine with a lot more twicking, but lets be honest. If we want linux on the Desktop, twicking should be about getting more out of the system, not getting it to work!

So... OpenSUSE? Simply the best.