I am very pleased to see this released, as some good improvements have been made.
Note, however, that there have been some last-minute troubles with NetworkManager and ifup, and I am not sure they have been 100% fixed[1]. Heise pointed out that they had the same problem with the release version[2]. If any problem should arise, YaST should be able to switch between using ifup and NetworkManager.
Other than that: try Tumbleweed, the sort-of-rolling-release based on the current major version[3]. It is about to be rebased to 12.3 and will receive updates more quickly than the mainline. And it is curated and steered by Greg KH!
I watched the video they had linked for an intro to the KDE desktop. I must say, KDE has become pretty slick now, and OpenSUSE does a good job with their KDE desktop.
Sorry to be so negative, but uggh... So much work has gone into KDE over the years and it still reminds me of 90's IT-guy art. From the rainbow colored icons to the cluttered layouts to the mixed light and dark themes.
I was actually more excited about the functionality of Dolphin, than the default theme, which is a bit dated. I have seen some people do some nice themes for KDE. Better defaults are needed, I agree.
In terms of desktop environments, I've only used Ubuntu and Fedora recently, but I've found their font rendering to be sufficiently pleasant. Either way, the lower-level features of the OS are much more important to me, as is probably the case with most Linux users.
they are? i thought when they were configured correctly they were considered similar in quality, but different in approach to osx (there is a long article somewhere discussing this, but i cannot find it now i need to reference it, sorry).
Above with an Opensuse 12.3 installation updated from RC2 to the release, with nvidia proprietary drivers installed (GO2 version, GT520 card) and ms web core fonts installed (fetchmsttfonts). Screen resolution is the default 96 dpi.
Looks not far south of Ubuntu to me. How bad does it look to you?
Ubuntu have a patched library and sensible defaults that gives their distributions a better out of box (off DVD?)experience. I wish others would pay attention to this kind of detail.
I've found that with nvidia graphics cards I need to use the proprietary drivers; nouveau is not quite there yet with fonts in my experience. I'd be delighted if someone has a font-config fix for that as nouveau is pretty nice these days.
KDE hides the hinting/subpixel antialiassing settings in Application Appearance / Fonts from memory.
As a Debian user that was something that I wasn't satisfied, and which Ubuntu did much better than anyone else, finally I found this link and I could match Ubuntu font rendering.
when I set up my debian VM on a new laptop recently, it took me a few days to (be bothered to) figure out how to fix font rendering in XFCE. Once I did, I could use the same fonts and font sizes as in OS X with comparable (although slightly different) final effect.
I've always had a little bit of a soft spot for SuSE, and I had my fingers crossed that when they were acquired by Novell, it would become more popular in the business world.
I think two main things are holding it back from becoming one of the 'main' distributions. The first is YaST, which is just strange in the land of yum and apt. The second is just the sheer amount of support distros like Ubuntu have. There's not as many resources out there, even though the last time I checked OpenSUSE had a strong, but small community.
YaST is not comparable to yum or apt. YaST serves as a general OS configuration tool, sort of like "Control Panel" in MS Windows. While YaST can be used to install packages, packages can be retrieved from the command-line using "zypper" which functions similarly to apt-get and yum: http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Zypper
I'm not really sure what you are referring to with "support". If you are referring to the sheer size of the community, Ubuntu does has a larger community and also benefits from the fact that most Debian-related/Ubuntu-derivative related docs/advice apply to Ubuntu as well. It looks like openSUSE has a fairly active community forum: http://forums.opensuse.org/english/
YaST vs yum/apt is technically a wrong dichotomy, since YaST (as a package manager) is just a graphical frontend to zypper, which is pretty much like yum and apt, just with its own syntax.
I know that many people dislike YaST, yet I have never understood why. The point is that you do not have to use YaST, you can edit every config in the normal way with your favourite text-editor, you can do everything via scripts, you can do everything headless etc.
YaST is a nice bonus, but openSUSE offers the same thing everybody else offers in terms of non-gui tools. Just from personal use patterns, I sometimes use YaST for convenience sake, the user editor is nice, and so is the bootloader-stuff. Can I do it differently? Sure, user{mod,add) etc. work just as well and might be preferential sometimes, the point is that both work.
In case anyone else was interested, this doesn't mean arm8 is sampling anywhere as far as i can tell, the people doing the work seem to be using a software virtual machine.
Greg KH gave a talk at Linaro Connect recently in which he mentions being contacted by somone who accidentally let slip they were in posession of very new silicon, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiED1K98lnw
The fact people have to ask this because of "secure boot" is, in my opinion, some incredibly sad shit. Locking down hardware, or erecting barriers, bothers me a lot.
Try disabling SecureBoot in the BIOS. I was able to install Linux on my girlfriend's lenovo x230 with secure boot and windows 8 simply by toggling the option off.
Note, however, that there have been some last-minute troubles with NetworkManager and ifup, and I am not sure they have been 100% fixed[1]. Heise pointed out that they had the same problem with the release version[2]. If any problem should arise, YaST should be able to switch between using ifup and NetworkManager.
Other than that: try Tumbleweed, the sort-of-rolling-release based on the current major version[3]. It is about to be rebased to 12.3 and will receive updates more quickly than the mainline. And it is curated and steered by Greg KH!
[1]: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=798348
[2]: http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/Die-Neuerungen-in-Opensuse-... (german)
[3]: https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed