Kubuntu 10.10 ditched in favor of openSUSE 11.3

Enough is enough...

After a change to Ubuntu 10.04 in begin of June, I switched back to Kubuntu 10.04 in September  due to a buggy Gnome (for example this long-known bug with copy & past not working after you close the software of origin) and other reasons. But Kubuntu didn't look nice either, and felt as well unstable and slow. I nevertheless waited for 10.10 to come out and to do an upgrade, but it just got worse. The software I need for my work didn't function as expected (take Skype for example).

Research

I did some research about opinions from others for a stable workstation Linux. The main contestants were Red Hat or SLED. Fedora, the offspring of Red Hat is cutting etch and therefor object to possible breaks in software. Nothing I can use. So I installed openSUSE in VirtualBox and gave it a tryout. The first impression was more then good, the difference between Kubuntu and it are big.

It's done...

So I ditched this week my Kubuntu 10.10 installation for openSUSE 11.3.
But what i missed straight away was dash (the bash replacement under Ubuntu), it will take some time, but I will get used to it.
What else struggled me was the RPM package management system. It is far from as smooth as the Debian packaging system; mostly I had problems with dependency resolution - or I just do not know yet how to use it correctly. And when talking about the packaging system, I was (and am) quiet confused with the repositories under openSUSE. So what I appreciated much, the first moment I knew about it, is the package search on software.opensuse.org, so no need to search a long time for a certain package in some lost repository (or a PPA for Ubuntu).

It feels good

For now I can feel more stability and cohesion in openSUSE then I felt in Kubuntu for a long time. My Skype worked straight out the box, I got Sun/Oracle Java and VirtualBox installed and can code right away without having the impression that my workstation is an old 486.

Just on my servers I will hold on to Ubuntu, I cannot afford it to have downtime on them just because I messed something up as long as I am not familiar to zypper...

PS: My favorite game OpenTTD did install completely with the necessary content and works great !