OpenSUSE 13.2: Have your gecko and eat your rolling distro too

Gecko? Really?

Chameleon, no?

Avoid btrfs like the plague

I experimented with btrfs for nearly two years, on a heavily used desktop cum media server, and the results were appalling. I dread to think how it would cope in an enterprise environment, if it can't even deal with my little desktop.

The first big showstopper is that, apparently, 7 years on, btrfs still doesn't have a fully functional fsck utility - a fact that I find truly mind boggling. I mean, seriously, how hard can it be, Oracle?

Worse still was the performance, which was cripplingly slow, due to the vast overhead imposed by the fallacy of trying to implement a database as a filesystem. Lags of 20 to 30 seconds were not uncommon, and the startup was about 2 minutes slower than using ext4. This crippling effect actually intensified over time, due to that other "feature not a bug", where apparently btrfs becomes heavily fragmented ... by design - a concept I hoped I'd long since left behind with Windows. This was further compounded by the fact that btrfs lacks an online defragger, and neither its "autodefrag" mount option nor offline defragmentation seemed to make the slightest difference.

Btrfs must surely qualify as one of the worst filesystems in computing history. It's a resource-sucking pig that thrashes hard drives and takes productivity back to the era of stone tablets, only worse, as it's actually much easier to recover lost data from stone tablets. The fact that the kernel crew are committed to abandoning ext4 in favour of this junk is simply terrifying.

SuSE

SuSE 6.4 was my first ever GNU/Linux system. I eventually drifted to Gentoo and then on to Debian which is what I use today. But SuSE started me off. It's good to see it still going strong. And it's good to see BTRFS taking off after a rocky start. I might set this up on a box to try it out. Anyway, pint for the memories. :)

openSuSE beats Ubuntu

I should know - I've been testing different distro's on my work laptop looking for the perfect environment to do my development work in. I'm the only Linux machine in an office (and server) full of Windows.

openSuSE just works. I can get to the server without any issue, it's quick loading the files and saving them. LibreOffice is awesome in this release, works so much better than the one found on Ubuntu 14.04. Finally as well, GNOME 3 is beautiful. I'm still rocking the version of GNOME that came with Debian 7 on my private laptop, and the world of difference is incredible. I always liked GNOME 3, but now I love it.

Whats more, is that openSuSE was near enough the first distro I used back in mid-2000's after my brief flirtation with Red Hat came to an end, although I moved on to Fedora in 2008/2009 and never went back to openSuse until this week. I remember reading an article at the time that if you were to compare distro's to cars, Ubuntu would be the Ford Fiesta while openSuSE would be the Mercedes. Now, nearly 10 years on, the same actually still rings true to me.

I'm just so impressed with it, I can't speak highly enough of it. Before I used this version Debian 7 was the be all and end all for me. But now I'm giving serious consideration to removing that from my private laptop and sticking openSuSE on it.

Well done guys, well bloody done!