OpenSUSE 10.3 First Impressions

This past weekend I have installed OpenSUSE 10.3

My first impressions: it looks very polished, albeit a bit slow (but then again, I installed it on a virtual machine, on a USB external drive). It installed some services that I do not care about such as SMB and power management. The Beagle thing seems to have an initial crawl phase (I guess that it indexes a whole bunch of stuff) and I had to kill and remove it.

And I was annoyed that there is no gtkhtml3-devel package (but I found what I needed here, so no biggie).

On the nice side, OpenSUSE 10.3 comes in the box with GCC 4.2, unlike Ubuntu 7.10 that ships with 4.1.3 (at least in the tribe pre releases, we still have to see what the official release contains).

Overall, a nice system, packed with apps and looking slick and crisp.

Speaking of Ubuntu, it is not a bad distribution either, but it is getting credit and hype for work that the upstream distro (Debian) is doing, and everybody knows that the heavy lifting in kernel development happens at RedHat, Novell, and IBM.