OpenSuse 10.1 VS Fedora Core 5 (split from Re: OpenSUSE 10.1)

[Alan Dayley]

On Mon, August 14, 2006 10:13 am, Josh Coffman wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   Alan mentioned in another thread that OpenSuse has
> been a nice change from FC5 despite the update
> problems.
>
>   I've been in the Fedora boat since I migrated
> (mostly) to linux last year.
>
>   I'm really curious how they compare, and what
> problems people have had with FC5.
>
>   Suse was one of the distro's I was close to picking
> before going with FC. FC5 has been largely a big
> improvement from FC4 from my experience. It
> auto-detected pretty much everything on my HP laptop.
> Even the wifi works now thanks to the bcm43xx drivers.
> (NDISWrapper worked for me before bcm43xx.)
>
>   What about OpenSuse 10.1 is worth dumping FC5? And
> what about waiting for FC6?

As always, YMMV.

I have been a Red Hat user since Red Hat Linux 6.2 and up through the
Fedora Cores to FC 5.  For me, these are some of the things that got me
looking for something else:

- Palm device synchronization broke in a different way for different palm
device models between each Fedora upgrade.  With FC5, synchronization with
one model will not work at all because the palm gives up talking to the PC
at 5 seconds and the connection in FC5 does not go live for 6-7 seconds. 
Used to work in FC4 (after tweaking).

- Connecting my digital video camera via IEEE-1394 no longer worked after
FC3 because they decided to insert an extra directory layer in the /dev
tree (/dev/raw1394/raw1394 when it used to be /dev/raw1394 - why change?)
so that applications could not find the camera.

- In FC4 and FC5 the printer server would just disable the printer by
itself.  Never did track that one down, just had to go restart the queue
when a print job would not come out.  Annoying interruption at work when a
child's homework wouldn't print.

- After connecting and then removing my wife's MP3 player (Creative Zen,
looks like a USB flash drive to the system), connecting other USB flash
drives or palm devices would be broken.  Only fixable by reboot, at least
for the amount of digging around that I did.  (To be fair, this may be a
quirk of my motherboard, who knows.)

- Copying lots of songs to my wife's player would bog down to almost a
stop after about 300MB.  The solution was to abort the copy, unplug the
player, wait a few seconds, reconnect and restart the copy.  Assuming you
could remember where it left off.  She changes songs fairly often so this
because a real bother.

These are the issues I can think of off the top of my head. 
Responsiveness from the FC community to these issues amounted to a
friendly shrug of the shoulders and a request to tell them what I did once
I got it fixed.  The palm synchronization issue resulted in a reminder
that FC is development, bleeding edge stuff so I should not expect it to
work for everything.

So, I left for OpenSUSE.  None of the above issues have happened with
OpenSUSE 10.1.  There has been one time that the USB got messed up
somehow, like it used to on FC, but we had just attached and disconnected
a card reader within about 2 seconds so I think hotplug got confused in
that case.

FC and Red Hat have been and are good distros.  They do good work.  But,
my experience shows that as FC has progressed, it has become more and more
a development/testing/experimenting platform.  The project defines itself
to be leading edge so I guess problems are to be expected, to some extent.
 The edge has just grown to sharp for me.

OpenSUSE's purpose is supposed to be somewhat similar to FC so maybe the
same rough edges will also appear in it over time.  But for now, for the
issues we had, OpenSUSE is much smoother for me and my family.

Alan