openSUSE 42.2 installed in VMWare with Win 7 host

[buster]

Any distro with the number 42 in it has to be tried. And I've always had an admiration for Suse, but not a love that has ever blossomed into romance. It may be similar to what we concluded at the Dec meeting about Fedora - it's an enterprise system, not an easy to install and use system like Mandrake, Mepis, or Linux Lite. But it does have strengths.

The download is huge, so you should have lots of 'stuff' right at the beginning. The install is the usual straightforward process, and it doesn't hang or boot into an odd message. The KDE option is comfortable to use. The default desktop is nice. Has all the things for work, but not for play.

Now you can get these things, but there are no games, no codecs except open source, no manual posted on the desktop as Mepis used to do, and the suggestions on the web don't always work. (Maybe if I spoke German they would.)

To get codecs you need to enable the Packman repository, which I finally figured out though I've done it many times over the years. Then you can download VLC and it's codec package and magically everything works. (The 'easy install' on the web didn't work this time.)

An unpleasant reality for me - you actually have to do something to see the shares on Windows computers. (Linux Lite and Ubuntu Mate do this automatically. I can see the shares in my home folder.)

One very nice thing - After I download in this virtual machine to protect Win7 from nefarious villains, drag and drop is automatic between host and guest. So movies and TV shows are where I want them.

This is one of the major Linux distros so is probably worth looking at. And it does what I need. But I don't think it's a good beginner's choice.

[ssfc72]

Thanks for the info, on OpenSuse, Harry! Nicely done write up and lots of good advice!

[fox]

I seriously thought of openSUSE LEAP in place of Fedora 25. I have a soft spot for openSUSE; it was the first distro I ever installed. That was 20 years ago, when I bought a boxed set for $50, and installed it on a Mac PPC. It worked, but there was nothing on it worth keeping it for - few GUI programs and no openOffice or libreOffice in those days. I had openSUSE LEAP 42.1 installed on my Acer for a brief period. Worked well, but no compelling reason to keep it. So I replaced it with Fedora 24 (now 25), which at least has a working Wayland Display Server. Now that I put Fedora on a main computer, I'm finding a few annoyances that I hadn't noticed with casual use. If you like Unity and Gnome (vs Cinnamon and Mate), I find it hard to beat Ubuntu, wrinkles and all.

Back to openSUSE LEAP, I had good success with the one-click installs; better luck than Harry did. The difference may be time. It takes a bit of time after a new version comes out for the devs to update the auxiliary repos. Same with Fedora. I'm guessing that the one-click installs for 42.2 will be better in a month.

[buster]

For anyone who intends to use Suse,  I would suggest going to this site after the install. It will save you a lot of work, and make the distro much more comfortable: '8 things to do after installing leap'.

http://www.cio.com/article/3003865/open-source-tools/8-things-to-do-after-installing-opensuse-leap-421.html