OpenSUSE 11.2 First Impressions

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Can you say bloatware? Boy I sure can after the painful installation of OpenSUSE 11.2. Of course I should have been warned off OpenSUSE when it suggested on boot that at 768MB of virtual RAM (I was installing in a Virtual Machine) that I didn't really have enough memory. This is almost as bad as Windows Vista's requirements, it almost makes me wonder if there was some side bloatware deal?

After installation performance was no better, KDE 4.x limped along like Flipper beached on the sea shore (Yes, the movie Flipper was on T.V. last night). Really, performance was truly bad, especially compared to Fedora 13 which requires at least 512MB of RAM, but seems to hum along quite a bit faster.

I soldiered on and decided to do yast updates, but because I was already feeling the pain of a slow system I decided to do the upgrade via the yast text interface. Starting the yast upgrade was fast, but it seemed to take forever for only a handful of packages. When it was done it apparently wasn't done (only deltas?).

OpenSUSE has some nice features, but come on guys, 1GB of RAM should not be necessary for reasonable performance!

Incidentally all this was initially to set up a local web server to play with some development ideas. After this painful experience I decided it was much better just to set up an Ubuntu Server (text interface) in the Virtual machine and figure out how to bridge the interface to the host OS.