» What’s unique about openSUSE?
I stole this straight from Joe Brockmeier’s blog, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity. This is a really cool list.
He has a list of the things that are unique about openSUSE over other distributions. Here’s the list he provided:
- YaST
- Zypper
- openSUSE Build Service
- The “Slab” menu — now upstream in KDE, but still unique to openSUSE / SLED on GNOME
- Default install “full of useful software”
- Forums (I was thinking of the distro itself, but it makes sense that the support and such from the forums is a good reason to use openSUSE.)
- Direct participation in upstream development of GNOME and KDE, and the choice of both in openSUSE
- “Polished” desktops — I do think we ship very well-polished versions of GNOME and KDE
- One-click install
- Retail box - Our retail box is a great way for beginners to get started with openSUSE
- Security features (AppArmor, SUSE Firewall)
- Mono integration - done very well in openSUSE
- Software Repos in the openSUSE Build Service (I’m a Gwibber fan, which lives in the “FunkyPenguin” repo)
- Some people like the DVD image with lots of software vs. live CDs with a minimal selection
- Several people mentioned stability, though this is hard to quantify and in my experience, stability is usually a benefit of Linux in general
- Dual-arch x86_64 implementation — so you can easily run 32-bit apps on 64-bit openSUSE
- Two-year lifespan — a reasonably long lifecycle for a release, not too short, but not aimed at mission-critical areas where a system will just run until it dies on
- the same OS version
- Server support — openSUSE makes a very good server distro
- An awesome mascot (really, Geeko wins that one hands down)
Nice work, Joe! Head on over to his blog entry to read the whole posting.