openSUSE: My openSUSE desktop

I recently updated to beta 3 of SUSE Linux 10.0 (the artist formerly known as “SUSE LINUX Professional”).

So far, I’m loving what this version is becoming. It’s already looking very sleek, and is performing very well for me.

Yes, I am using KDE. Having spent over a year using GNOME–that’s since I switched over to Linux as my primary OS–I decided that it was time to build proficiency in “the other side” before it starts to seem too much like “the other side.”

There are some things I like about KDE better than GNOME. (GNOME is still too familiar to me to grant KDE any stake to the “overall superiority” claim just yet.) I think that its mostly the polish it has. It feels more like it’s its own operating system, with its own personality. By comparison, I had often felt that Linux (GNOME) has too generic of an interface–too bland of a personality. KDE is somehow warmer. But maybe it’s just that “exporing a new desktop interface” feeling. (If this initial impression incites lecturing comments, or worse gets used by someone to bolster an argument on KDE’s superiority, then you may have overestimated my longterm allegiance to this initial, whimsical impression. That sentence was meant to be read as quickly as possible. Always the overzealous wordsmith…)

I have my three main Novell applications working well. That would be GroupWise, GroupWise Messenger (still via gaim–Kopete pending time coincididing with remembering), and the iFolder 2 client. I would prefer to be on iFolder 3, but I have been dreading the 4GB re-synch of my folder up to the new iFolder 3 server.

openSUSE comes loaded with OpenOffice.org 2, and Novell is still standardized on v1.4.x. My other laptop–because one of the ways I stay in touch with my technical roots is by still needing to have more than one laptop–has Novell Linux Desktop on it, and hence OO.o v1.4 on it. I have been exchanging documents back and forth through the iFolder, and OpenOffice 2 has been really good with the backward compatability. (Not perfect, mind you. There was an Impress document that had some weirdly embedded charts from Calc in it, and hoo! was that ever a mess.) But overall, I can’t wait until Novell standardizes on the 2.x version. It’s a really solid revision up from 1.x.

Finally, the chameleon in my wallpaper is from a picture I took while in Madagascar. (Some may ask: “Why Madagascar?” To them I say: “To see things like this chameleon!” Those people typically give me funny looks.) Unfortunately, it was probably a set up. Later the same day I saw many of these poor buggers invariably stuck at the end of a short stick, the other end of which was in the hands of a 6-year-old boy. This one was not in quite so direct a danger. It was on a small island to which my wife and I went as part of a day tour, an island that had a colony of Flying Foxes living on it. I later figured out that this poor chameleon had probably been sequestered from his nearby native habitat to this little island to be a tourist curiousity after having been bought from one of those six year old kids. The humanity! And the herpetology.

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