OpenSUSE Leap 42.2 - Difficult to get start with, smooth experience thereafter : Review

Recently, openSUSE release engineering team had announced public availability of openSUSE Leap 42.2, latest stable release of hybrid operating system that combines stable SEL(SUSE Enterprise Linux) core packages with community contributed packages to make an  extremely stable, secure and conservative operating system.

Latest issue of Distrowatch Weekly (27th November 2016) features a review of OpenSUSE Leap 42.2 as cover story. By concluding this detailed exploration of openSUSE, reviewer remarks that, during his experiments he faced a lot rough edges such as frequent bong sound on desktop, small fonts, and multimedia support ..etc. However, he was able to overcome all these issues using powerful configuration tool YaaST of openSUSE and also other KDE Plasma configuration tools. After resolving these issues he was able to enjoy a pleasantly stable, quite polished experience.

openSUSE is a community distribution which shares code and infrastructure with SUSE Linux Enterprise. The openSUSE distribution is available in two editions. The first is a stable, point release edition with a conservative base called Leap. The second edition is an experimental rolling release called Tumbleweed. The openSUSE project recently released a new update to the Leap edition, launching openSUSE 42.2 Leap in mid-November. Leap editions receive approximately three years of security updates and minor point releases are published about once per year. The new 42.2 release includes a long term support kernel (Linux 4.4) and KDE's Plasma 5.8 desktop which is also supposed to receive long term support from its upstream project.

openSUSE 42.2 is available primarily for 64-bit x86 computers. There are ARM ports available, but they need to be tracked down through the project's wiki and are not available through the main Download page. The new release is available in two builds, a 4.1GB DVD and a 95MB net-install disc. I opted to download the larger of the two ISO files for my trial.
See distrowatch weekly to go through the complete review.

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