Goodbye openSUSE (and see you soon!)

I have been a long and faithful SuSE and openSUSE user since SuSE Linux Professional 9.0, and I followed its development closely, and quite often critically, since the distribution has become a completely Open Source project, with some contribution, essentially to the Italian translation and filling bug reports.  However things changed: with openSUSE 11.1 the number of problems on my machines increased significantly (system freezes, X performance and stability problems, …). As a consequence, I have recently decided to switch to another distribution, ubuntu, which is currently offering what I need, without the troubles I had on openSUSE 11.1, which is surely very far from the SuSE (yes, with the small u :-)) I knew at the beginning, and that made me think “This is the distribution I want to use” and kept me thinking that way until now.

SuSE used to be a distribution you installed and forgot: you knew that for two years your system was set, and you could enjoy it without many troubles. OpenSUSE 11.1 is a distribution prepared in a hurry, without the care for those details that used to be the unique signature of SuSE, and that made the difference. To be able to use openSUSE 11.1 I should rely on unsupported repositories to obtain more recent packages (kernel included), which might be OK for my home system, but not for a production machine.

There are interesting plans for openSUSE 11.2, and I sincerely hope openSUSE will go back to be the distribution I want to use very soon: there are good developers, and motivated community members that are trying to make it possible., and openSUSE has the nicest mascotte ever, the lovely chameleon Geeko! I hope that the longer release schedule, the recent effort for the creation of a community testing team, and a more equilibrated set of decisions with respect to what should go in the final release and what should be held until the next release, will work and convince me to go back.

In the meanwhile, I’ll give ubuntu a chance to show me how good it is, and at the moment it seems to work without troubles, even if I have to become familiar with its tools, and while configuring it I missed the nice YaST control centre offered by openSUSE.