Adventures in openSUSE Linux

Questions and preamble As has become normal, the FOSS/Linux community is peppered with anxiety over yet another major change to the tech landscape issuing forth from Redmond. With the release of Windows 10 comes a great many questions for the thoughtful, and this is especially true for our very own Linux communities. With gratitude we can recall our own past relief upon discovering that UEFI and Secureboot are not the herald of the end-times we had feared them to be. That being so does not however relieve the question of safely upgrading our dual-booting computers to Windows 10 without losing our ability to run Linux in tandem. Excitement for Windows 10 was largely absent in me. I had grown quickly comfortable to the Windows 8.1 work-flow as it shared some similarities in those key areas which I had already grown to love in the GNOME Shell. Further, Windows served a role limited to usage for proprietary software that I deemed not sensible to coax into service on a Linux OS. Howev...

The below is a response to a Facebook query on why we use openSUSE over Ubuntu. I was happy with how it turned out and thought it could prove helpful to a larger audience. There are a great number of reasons why we use openSUSE. Ultimately, what one prefers boils down to personal taste. I'll tell you why I use openSUSE. 1) YaST: YaST is our system administration tool. It can be used both in graphical environment and on the command line. YaST has modules for managing an enormous number of things, such as /etc/sysconfig configuration files and systemd processes to boot loader configuration and repository management. YaST provides comfortable, safe tools for working with important parts of the system that would otherwise be difficult, confusing, and potentially dangerous. 2) zypper: Our package manager is called zypper. It has the most advanced dependency resolution available of any package manager whether it be Linux or another operating system. What this means is t...

Naturally, if it were so simple one would not need an article. There has been a lot of news floating around about  +Netflix finally being available natively for  +Linux . In case you are not aware, getting Netflix on Linux was a labored and complicated process requiring all sorts of WINE hacking or virtualization. +Microsoft had announced that its strategy would be changing away from Silverlight which Netflix has depended on for their DRM content delivery. Netflix then announced they would be dropping Silverlight in favor of  +HTML5 once some DRM framework was developed so they could secure their licensed content. Naturally this announcement was greeted with excitement from Linux desktop users all over, excepting of course those whom are absolutely opposed to DRM. In the last couple of days, there has been a flurry of articles and tutorials on how to get Netflix to work natively. Most of these of course are claiming that it is +Ubuntu only, though this is abs...

I've been running the beta 1 of 13.2 for a few days now, and there are lots of interesting and welcome changes. Overall it is surprisingly bug free, and I anticipate it will be a very smooth release (at least on  +GNOME since I don't use KDE). Now, if you want to know what versions of packages are included you may take a look at this post . I on the other hand want to introduce you to the things that you may NOT know, and that are particularly interesting. So we have long heard that btrfs would be replacing EXT4 as the default file-system in  +openSUSE and many other distributions eventually. Generally it is ready and eventually will outstrip EXT4 and other file-systems for speed as well as it's many other compelling features. However as of yet it still suffers from being a bit too slow. Thus, if you use a separate /home partition you'll notice XFS is being proposed as the default. For some of you this makes sense, but if you are like me it came as quite a surprise...

Here is a link to download the RPM for Kingsoft Office so you can try it, and not wonder if this is vaporware... it isn't. Lately I've been seeing more and more buzz surrounding Kingsoft Office for Linux. KSO has been gaining a rather devoted following despite it's Linux port still being in alpha and not near to release. My first familiarity with Kingsoft Office was reading about their Android offering which has had rave reviews and a devoted following. Across all platforms, people praise it for its interface and its exceptional compatibility with Microsoft Office formatted documents. So with all the buzz, rumors, and conflicting information I wanted some clear answers for myself and to share with you. On May 5th I had the opportunity to interview Jin who serves as the Chief Software Architect for  +Kingsoft Office  . Before I dive right into the things we addressed in the course of our interview, I wanted to give you a brief background for Kingsoft and their of...

In late March 2012 I gave  +openSUSE  12.1 a second chance with +GNOME  3 after having a horrible experience with the version of KDE that shipped in that version. By April 4th I was a true believer in the GNOME Shell and the new user experience paradigm that was evolving in GNOME 3. Indeed, each version of GNOME since has been more exciting than the last, bringing massive improvements in performance, stability, reliability, workflow, and aesthetics. Indeed, a true tribute to the GNOME developers is that I hadn't been so sold on an environment since I left Apple's Mac OS X behind in 2010. Each version of GNOME has shown refinements as dramatic as anything I'd seen in Mac OS X, but at a breakneck pace. The latest GNOME 3.12 is not merely an incremental improvement like previous versions, but rather a shocking advancement. In this article I will allude to some changes that happened in recent previous versions since they deserve comment. Elegance I love an elegant de...