OpenSuSE 11.1 First Impressions

I have been running OpenSuSE 11.1 for about a week now. My first impression is that it feels nicer, but that there are severe setbacks that slipped through QA.

  • It seems to boot faster than 11.0. I was never really bothered by the boot time, so I do not have concrete measurements.
  • The 30000-wakeups-per-second bug is gone! Yeah!
  • It’s still Beagle-infested, so everything is dog slow out of the box. I am having a hard time thinking anyone with a laptop really likes to have Beagle on it. Oh well, I simply use rpm to erase anything related to beagle and install Gnu’s locate.
  • Printing on my hplj-3330 works, but I had to force it to use a non-default driver. That’s not a big deal for me, but it fails the Grandma-test.
  • I plug in my camera. I am asked if I want to import photos to f-spot. I do. f-spot then starts but tells me “Could not lock device”. A bit of poking around reveals that gvfsd-gphoto2 needs to be killed for f-spot to work.
  • The Cairo shipped, 1.8.0, is old and has a badly-broken pdf backend. This evidently is known in Cairo land. I wouldn’t expect anything that prints using gtk+ to work right. Also, since Gnumeric’s tests fail, I need to work around that before I can do releases again.