A look at openSUSE 12.3

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The March 13 release of openSUSE 12.3 comes just six months after its predecessor, which is a bit quicker than the target of eight months between releases that the project has set. But the shorter development cycle does not mean that openSUSE 12.3 is lacking for new features. From the kernel up through the desktops and applications, 12.3 offers much that is new.

The project was nice enough to provide members of the press with early access to the 12.3 final release. The distribution comes in multiple flavors, of course; I tried the Live KDE version to get a feel for the new release. It has been many years since I ran openSUSE, and I never ran it in anger, so I tried to put it through its paces a bit over the five or six days since it was made available.

Since a Live distribution is somewhat cumbersome to use as a regular system, I opted to install it as a dual-boot system with Fedora on my trusty laptop. While I was ultimately successful in getting things installed that way, it took a rather extensive detour through GRUB 2, GUID partition table (GPT) partitions, resize2fs, and so on to get there. It's not clear that openSUSE or its installer were the only culprits, as I have dark suspicions about the BIOS on the laptop, but it is clear that allowing the installer to write to the master boot record (MBR) in a dual-Linux setup leads to an unbootable system—at least it did for me, and more than once. It should be noted, though, that the Live media was quite useful in helping to recover from that state as it had all of the GRUB 2 tools and GPT-aware utilities needed to fix things up.

One new thing that came in with 12.3 is a change to Live media. It is now nearly 1G in size, which means it won't fit on a CD—either DVD or USB sticks must be used instead. That extra space allowed for additional packages, including LibreOffice 3.6 and OpenJDK 7, though not GIMP 2.8 as promised in the RC2 news item.

Installation was straightforward, with the only "tricky" piece being the partition and filesystem layout. 12.3 gives the option of using Btrfs for all non-boot filesystems, which seemed worth trying. I haven't done anything particularly interesting with Btrfs (yet), but it seems to be working just fine for / and /home.

Other than some cosmetic differences (theme, background, and so on), openSUSE 12.3 didn't seem much different from Fedora 18 once I logged into the KDE desktop (or Plasma workspace if that's the new terminology). It comes with KDE 4.10, which is more recent than Fedora's 4.9, but that difference was not particularly obvious. It works well for the limited desktop use cases I need—terminal windows, a browser, email client, and so on. I was able to use the Dolphin file manager to mount and access the encrypted /home that I use on the Fedora side, for example, which was convenient, but I still haven't gotten the hang of KDE Activities.

KDE is not the only desktop available for openSUSE 12.3; there is, of course, a GNOME version of the distribution based on GNOME 3.6. Community manager Jos Poortvliet put together a lengthy preview of openSUSE 12.3 for desktop users that covers both desktops. KDE was chosen as the default for openSUSE back in 2009, but its GNOME support is said to be top-notch as well.

UEFI secure boot support is available in 12.3, and the systemd integration that started in earlier versions has been completed. The switch to MariaDB as the "default MySQL" has been completed. MySQL is still available, but MariaDB has been chosen as a more community-oriented, drop-in replacement for MySQL.

The kernel is fairly recent, based on 3.7. It exhibited the same annoying blinking WiFi indicator behavior that I have seen on the laptop with other recent kernels, though it was easy set a driver parameter for iwlegacy and get rid of it. In fact, the same file I used on the Fedora side (with a minor name change) just dropped into /etc/modprobe.d on openSUSE. Perhaps that's not surprising, but it is indicative of how it felt to use 12.3; it was often hard to remember that I wasn't still running Fedora. Some adjustments were needed (e.g. retraining fingers to type "zypper" rather than "yum"), but the two distributions are quite similar.

There are a few oddities. The default is for the primary user to be logged in automatically, which doesn't seem like the most secure of choices. Installing Emacs led to a complaint about a lack of Asian fonts for Java. The auto-lock-screen appears not to work, as any key will unlock the screen, which seems to be a known problem, though it doesn't start working after 60 seconds for me. But those are pretty minor.

A more substantive complaint could be made about one of the more advanced features being touted for the release: using the Open Build Service (OBS) to get the latest and greatest packages. There is even a video in that news item describing how to use software.opensuse.org to update LibreOffice from the 3.6 version that comes with 12.3 to LibreOffice 4.0.

Perhaps LibreOffice was a poorly chosen example, but the video paints a picture that is very different from what a user will actually run into. In fact, it stops before things get interesting. The "one click install" offered does bring up the YaST software installer, but there are many more clicks ahead. If it were just extra clicks, it would be a pretty minor issue, but the new package conflicts with the old LibreOffice, so the user needs to make a decision about what to do—without a reasonable default (like "go ahead and break LibreOffice 3.6"). Beyond that, the upgrade caused YaST to choose an enormous number (over 100) of additional packages to install, many of which (telnet, screen, GIMP, ...) seemed to have nothing to do with LibreOffice. Licenses for Flash and Fluendo GStreamer plugins had to be clicked through as well. That said, once the process was complete, LibreOffice 4.0 was up and running on the system, it was just a lot more complicated than the video (which does feature some amusing Geeko animation) depicted.

But openSUSE is not specifically targeted at non-technical users, and anyone who has used Linux before has likely run into these kinds of issues once or twice. For technically savvy users, openSUSE provides a solid operating system with the ability to get bleeding-edge applications via OBS. For Fedora users, a switch will probably be uneventful, while other distribution users (non-systemd, .deb-based, or build-it-from-quarks-and-gluons, for example) may have some adjustments to make. It's not clear that there is a strong reason to do so, but if some "distro hopping" is in your plans, openSUSE should certainly be on the list. But for those who already use it, openSUSE 12.3 will be a welcome upgrade.