Posts Tagged ‘Compiz’

OpenSuse 11.0 Review

July 25th, 2008 Amol Gupta
I have used half a dozen of operating systems in the last few months and am now most comfortable with openSUSE provided by Novell.After using 10.3 for about 4 months I was waiting for the much hyped SUSE11.0. I had already croped up a lot of errers in the previous installations and the release of next ver was being delayed.All this made me more desperate to switch over to the next version.Finally openSUSE 11.0 was released on the 19th of june but could not get my hands on it for quiet some time(all because of two dead torrents and just a dialup connection at my place..),but not for long. Finally I have my copy of it and after testing it for erorrs I’am ready to install it on to my desktop(intel 945G,1.8GHz dual core,1Gb RAM,160Gb HDD). The istallation process is almost the same except the cool new interface.The process moves smoothly and it is ready to use without a reboot(unlike in the previous version).I prefered to use the KDE4 version(although it still offers KDE3.5 and the GNOME).The first looks of the desktop seem to be femiliar somethin like MS Vista.But soon on exploring the looks of KDE4 and compiz feel great.The desktop effects are absolute amaizing.There are 3 different places to acess and modify the effects and they even work without turning on the xgl.The deafult black theme looks more elegent then ever.The plasma is somewhat similar to the aero of vista.The widgets are cool and useful but more fearures could have been involved and hopefully they can be downloaded from net.The plasma dashdoard is an innovative and useful feature and seems to get more development in the future.The dolphin file explorer is good option.

Although there are a lot of new options to modify the looks but if you turn off the desktop effects,you are not left with much stuff.Such as I really miss editing the taskbar to make it transparent and using different wallpapers on all desktops.
 Talking about the looks,some of the great options have been included such as image on the cube cap,skydome and controling all the features of the cube.The best part is that the cube can now be transformed into many more things such as cylinders and frustums.It can be easily transformed by changing the number of sides(try having only 2 desktops and it looks like fliping a sheet of paper).The application switchers are of all the flavours(ring,covers…and the wow of vista is just another feature).The looks may prove to be irritating for the root as you have to turn them on each time when root login(not the same for the other users).


 Putting all the looks apart,the latest versions of all(almost) applications have been included.The firefox3 could have been provided(despite of only 2 days difference in release dates,the beta is not much stable).Wine 0.9.64 is also unstable(0.9.61 was a good option) and there is very less backward compatibility(I could not involve much of packages from 10.3 dvd).

Apart from all this Novell still has not given full video support and one ends up searching for codecs or downloading vlc player(with its irritating one click install which takes a couple of hours on a shared connection..).I hope NOVELL looks into this matter soon.
 Overall I would say that except all the great looks and softwares nothing much has changed and it happens to be quiet unstable(more KDE crashes than 10.3)making it merely a hype.A lot of work needs to be done for the next version 11.1 due later this year.
 Despite all this,it gives me no reeason to switch over to anything else!!!

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