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...