What’s unique about openSUSE?
I stole this straight from Joe Brockmeier’s blog, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity. This is a really cool list.
He has a list of the things that are unique about openSUSE over other distributions. Here’s the list he provided:
- YaST
- Zypper
- openSUSE Build Service
- The “Slab” menu — now upstream in KDE, but still unique to openSUSE / SLED on GNOME
- Default install “full of useful software”
- Forums (I was thinking of the distro itself, but it makes sense that the support and such from the forums is a good reason to use openSUSE.)
- Direct participation in upstream development of GNOME and KDE, and the choice of both in openSUSE
- “Polished” desktops — I do think we ship very well-polished versions of GNOME and KDE
- One-click install
- Retail box – Our retail box is a great way for beginners to get started with openSUSE
- Security features (AppArmor, SUSE Firewall)
- Mono integration – done very well in openSUSE
- Software Repos in the openSUSE Build Service (I’m a Gwibber fan, which lives in the “FunkyPenguin” repo)
- Some people like the DVD image with lots of software vs. live CDs with a minimal selection
- Several people mentioned stability, though this is hard to quantify and in my experience, stability is usually a benefit of Linux in general
- Dual-arch x86_64 implementation — so you can easily run 32-bit apps on 64-bit openSUSE
- Two-year lifespan — a reasonably long lifecycle for a release, not too short, but not aimed at mission-critical areas where a system will just run until it dies on
- the same OS version
- Server support — openSUSE makes a very good server distro
- An awesome mascot (really, Geeko wins that one hands down)
Nice work, Joe! Head on over to his blog entry to read the whole posting.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:07 am
I question the use of the word unique. Most of the things you list here I can point at fedora, mandriva or ubuntu and say “look they have it it too” ( a package manager, some forums, AppArmor, a retail box ) which kinda nulls the whole uniqueness.
That said, the mono and good hardware detection is why I use suse.
I just read joes blog before I posted this – I see this is from “marketing”.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Stuart,
I do certainly see where you are coming from. Many have similar types of tools. I think the uniqueness comes in where they are not *exactly* the same tools and Joe (and myself) believes that they are different and may have some advantages over similar tools in other distros. So for what that’s worth… there it is. Thanks for coming by.
Scott
January 14th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
openSUSE is the only linux distro that run vmware server properly – all the others will crash with OOM problems when you have a lot of VMs running on a large memory setup (eg: 4+ VMs on 8gigs ram).
Sad, but true.