Comments on: OpenSUSE 10.3 > Kubuntu Hardy -> Fedora 9 -> Mandriva 2008.1 -> OpenSUSE 11

By: Boycott Novell » Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part I: OpenSUSE Calls for Testers and Boarders [sic]

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 18:06:54 +0000

[...] following long story of distro-hopping is a journey that ends in OpenSUSE 11.0. I got bored with my Ubuntu Hardy install last week and [...]

By: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:07:02 +0000

Yeah, as was mentioned previously, the package management differences between 10.3 and 11.0 are like night and day. =:) Really, really much improved!!

By: apokryphos

apokryphos — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:49:07 +0000

Memory usage issues have been solved in 11.0 completely: http://duncan.mac-vicar.com/blog/archives/309

By: randomguy3

randomguy3 — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:47:04 +0000

I’m an Archlinux user myself, and I wouldn’t change my main desktop PC for anything else.

However, I did install OpenSUSE on my laptop, and on my parents’ “backup” computer, and I was very impressed with it. The main issue I had, in fact, was that zypper was a memory hog (this was 10.3). My laptop is a poor little thing with only 128Mb RAM, and it really couldn’t cope with zypper. So the laptop went back to Archlinux, where pacman is speedy and light.

By: apokryphos

apokryphos — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:28:39 +0000

Booky, a huge amount of misconceptions:

> Like I said, even if you disable the refreshing of the repositories, I doubt you could shave off any significant time it takes for the whole process of installing the application.

Are you for real? If all repositories are already refreshed, then it takes:

linux # time zypper in wine
Reading installed packages…
‘wine’ is already installed.
Nothing to do.

real 0m1.335s

So just what are you on about? Is 1.3s really too long for you?

Needless to say, if you downloaded and installed the package it would actually be significantly faster too because we’re using RPMs with LZMA payload. Read about it here, and see why it’s far superior to the current dpkg and old RPM implementation: http://opensuse.org/LZMA

> Not to mention that Ubuntu’s repositories house thousands of packages compared to the much limited selection of packages in OpenSuse default repos.

Once again, you’re unfairly comparing Ubuntu’s structure with openSUSE’s. Everyone knows that openSUSE’s default repositories are slimmer, and that the rest of everything is maintained in Packman and the openSUSE Build Service. Which have far more packages than Ubuntu or Debian.

We actually also have a reasonable backport service, again unlike Ubuntu which is virtually non-existent and pretty much always forces to have the latest version to get the latest KDE etc. We always have those packages for all the supported versions of SUSE (again, which is supported on average for longer than Ubuntu, though not the LTS versions).

> I completely disagree. The main purpose of a package manager, and its utility to the vast majority of users, is installing and removing packages. And it fails miserably at that.

The fact that you’re simply lying about its flaws is a little curious.

> I have no idea what that is, much less any use for it. However, if its responsible for making Zypper so slow

Remote RPM installation is being able to install RPMs from a remote location with the package manager; not sure what else it could mean. Like I’ve said, Zypper is emphatically NOT slow. I wish you wouldn’t lie about it. (Unless you think 1.3s is slow?)

> I highly doubt it considering I have faced more dependancy hell and package conflicts

Hey, this is coming from APT and DPKG developers. Ubuntu developers considered switching to Smart at one point in the past because APT is such a pain to deal with (particularly the solver). We also have actual test-cases showing that the solver is smarter too (Google it).

If you actually want to properly talk about any of these issues, feel free to ping me on IRC where it’s a lot easier to do: apokryphos on Freenode. (Or reply here and ping me if you’d want a final response to be here…)

By: conso

conso — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:57:06 +0000

I’m actually very impressed by the speed of the openSUSE – packagemanager. Startup is ok to me and the package-installation is actually faster then with apt/synaptic on my ubuntu-installation. Mostly because yast starts installing even before everything ist downloaded – I always asked myself, why synaptic doesn’t do this nice little trick.
Also, for a fast installation of only a small stack of packages, one can just use zypper on command-line, and get it in no time.

By: Kaczus

Kaczus — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:42:38 +0000

Redhat -> Fedora -> Gentoo -> Arch Linux -> Ubuntu
My story began with Redhat because it was “the linux” back then, then as new possibilities appeared I tried fedora for a couple of months but wanted more flexibility so I jumped into gentoo. After two days of compiling (everything else was rather quick and surprisingly simple with the great handbook) I was willing to keep it as my main system but then came the updates… So I tried arch and that was it, but after two years arch started to fall apart. Every update broke something. That’s when I decided to finally try ubuntu and I must say it’s great. Almost everything works out of the box and building/rebuilding packages is pretty easy. I admit Ubuntu is not perfect but it’s stable and flexible enough. It’s popular so it’s easy to find support and most developers provide packages for it. Even if there’s no “.deb” there’s “checkinstall” which makes building deb’s easy.

By: Drew

Drew — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:35:36 +0000

Yast, though, is more than just a package manager. You have one-stop-shopping for all of your administrative “shopping” plus you can access it in the CLI (even over SSH.. great for servers).

YAST has greatly improved over 10.3 in opening up and is as fast about as Synaptic on Ubuntu (which I am writing this on). Yes, it depends on the repositories you are connecting to but really, OSS, Non-OSS and Packman contain 99.9% of what you need but there are plenty of optional ones depending on your needs.

My Ubuntu definitely takes more than 3-4 seconds to come up in the first place and THEN I have to manually Reload, Mark to Update , Apply and Confirm.

By: mxttie

mxttie — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 23:18:11 +0000

yeah, it’s true, when you’re a suse 10.3 user switching to 11, trying out the new packagement system, you’re like: what the..??!!!!! this is a dream come true, watching your favorite distro finally becoming the best =)

By: xvalentinex

xvalentinex — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 23:16:12 +0000

Another for Arch Linux. I like the path format being used here. This is my path of distros used longer than 6 months. There are of course the random distros I tried for a week that I won’t include.

RedHat -> SuSE -> Ubuntu -> Gentoo -> Arch

By far my two favorite were Gentoo and Arch. I don’t know if my gentoo install was just too old, but updates started breaking almost every time, and I religiously do upgrades so it wasn’t like an update after a year. All that aside, Gentoo is a great distro, with awesome documentation. I learned so much about Linux using Gentoo.

Arch is much like Gentoo, it’s starts as very barbones system, and you build it the way you want. To me there is a simple elegance in this, but it could bite the novice Linux user who doesn’t quite know what he/she wants/prefers yet.

The package manager is fast, seems faster than apt to me, but I have never done a benchmark. The packages are simple .tar.gz files that you can easily extract to a directory and poke around. The PKGBUILD/ABS system is fantastic, much like ebuilds for Gentoo, but simpler.