Adventures in openSUSE Linux

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 absolutely false.

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