Giving up with Ubuntu for now - looking at OpenSuse

I need to upgrade my Linux computers.

Linuxers may explain you that Linux solves install dependencies issues - dll hell. Unfortunately that's wrong. One day, you will find the need to install software requiring something requiring a more recent kernel. Is it possible to get around it? May be, may be not. For the common Linux user (I don't want to recompile others stuff) the only path is to upgrade the entire OS and rebuild you complete stuff.

I did a try with Ubuntu desktop. Nice install and a good looking desktop with easy config. Synaptic package manager is great. The shell apt-get is great to install software in a matter of minute. I found it promising...

However I decided to go for OpenSuse. Why? Simply said, the separation between so called Desktop / Server is pure marketing vision - at least in the Linux world. What if you have a desktop and want to organize your mind with a wiki? What if you are a Web developper.What if you want a database etc Well it is all server stuff. So this separation is artificial and unworkable.

Ubuntu server exists but unfortunately they haven't done for server the great work they did for Desktop - I mean a good administration front-end. So every piece of software will require you to dig in to file based condigs without help.

So I started to regret Suse (I used Suse 9.2 and Sles 10.x) and Yast (equivalent to Windows control panel) which does an honorable job at configuring everything on your system.

It almost worked fine... Install is friendly as Ubuntu and the desktop is the same - I took Gnome as it seems to be defacto standard (in the past I preferred KDE but since their version 4 big bang they are loosing support I think).

Performance is not that great. Bloating is not only a MS Windows problem. Moving from Suse 9.x to 11.x seems to be the same performance loss as you move from XP to Vista...

Well it worked fine... until I tried to install extra packages - Python libs. Since then (is it related ? It is still strange to me, but it is the only thing I did with it...) I cannot mount my NFS share with my fresh desktop anymore (it worked, yes it worked for almost a day and now, it is gone). Mysterious ! And I don't see what's wrong with this NFS share.

Why do I need Python? Well, it will be for a coming article.