One thing that I noticed the moment I tried 12.2 was speed.openSUSE 12.2 is really fast. The speed can be noticed in every aspect of openSUSE whether it’s boot time, installation of an app or starting an app. I was curious was was behind this speed, even Jos Poorltvies, openSUSE community manager, initially thought “there had been improvements on zypper but it turned out the changes to glibc and GCC together created such a speedup it’s very noticeable… So those speed improvements are serious.”
Latest, Greatest & Stable
I am a multi-booter who switched between distros and installing openSUSE would take extra step where I had to update the grub from Ubuntu as openSUSE could not detect Grub2 of Ubuntu. So when openSUSE announced the inclusion of Grub2, after much debate, I was revealed. The GRUB2 bootloader is now the default with support for upcoming hardware (including support for the pain-in-the-neck UEFI secure boot). Now, I won’t have to worry about openSUSE not seeing Ubuntu and the rest in its boot menu.
With this release openSUSE has also adopted the revised and simplified the UNIX filesystem hierarchy where binaries are now being located under /usr/bin. It is using the latest Plymouth 0.8.6.1 which makes boot and shutdown flicker-free transitions and attractive animations – you will notice animated wallpaper during boot. Very polished.
Another notable improvement is the use of mature btrfs. openSUSE brings btrfs filesystem with error handling, better openSUSE integration and recovery tools.
OpenSUSE is also taking advantage of XOrg 1.12 which brings support for multitouch input devices, and multi-seat deployments.
Great Integration
In my opinion and experience openSUSE offers one of the best KDE integration (their GNOME implementation is also flawless) besides KDE-centric distos like Chakra. So I was looking at the KDE edition first (my GNOME review will follow).
As you know I moved to KDE recently (switched to GNOME for a while but then returned) and have become a huge fan of this popular and the oldest Desktop Environment which has evolved into a Software Compilation which offers a lot of applications such a Calligra, Krita, digiKam, K3B and much more. So for a KDE user, openSUSE is the perfect distro.
openSUSE offers an amazing KDE integration, everything seems in the right place. The combo of Yast with KDE’s System Settings (Configure Desktop) puts the control of entire PC in your hands.
Unfortunately, KDE 4.9 is missing from this release so there is not much I can talk about the default KDE. A KDE user may wonder what’s the point of packaging an older version of KDE in 12.2? There is a genuine reason as discussed on this thread, Opensuse 12.2 and KDE SC 4.9 had very similar release dates, which will make integrating the latter into the former problematic.
However you can easily upgrade 12.2 to KDE 49 by adding this repo.
Once I installed KDE SC 4.9 it was no more the same system, so what I am running is openSUSE with KDE 4.9. However, the speed enhancements that I talked about were before KDE 4.9 installation and I am expecting even better experience with KDE SC 4.9.
KDE is extremely polished and mature despite the fact that it is purely community driven project when compared with Unity or Gnome 3 Shell.
Read Full Review at Source Web Site: muktware.com
