One Year Later

The latest OpenSUSE, which is version 11.2, is particularly awesome. Not that it is bug free, no software of this complexity ever is, but it quite stable and has particularly few important issues. The sofware management is much more efficient and most pieces fit together well.

It's hard to regret having gone this route since it lets me do everything I need from a single machine. I managed to run all my most active websites, Neovoyage, Neocamera, Neoluminance and Cybernium from a single machine running OpenSUSE 11.2 64-bits using Apache 2's virtual hosting feature.

There remains a tarnished experience with the current state of graphics drivers which is the only time I truly miss OS/2 simple driver model. Essentially, drivers are installed either by packages or by installer programs. The latter makes an unknown set of changes to a system and do not cooperate with any other. Specifically, each time there is a kernel update, the ATI driver I use gets hosed somehow. This luckily does not happen often but having to recompile a kernel on an update is truly not what someone would call a user-friendly experience. An important thing to note specific to ATI drivers is that there are 3 different ones and they do not know about each other, so to install a different one you must manually uninstall the other.

Another tool I've added to my set is Parallels Desktop. This virtualization package is awesome because of its outstanding simplicity. Gettting up and running is simpler than I every expected for such thing although it does not install as a package, so each time there is a kernel update, it needs to be reinstalled.