My experiences trying out Ubuntu vs. openSUSE

Ubuntu 9.04 & openSUSE 11.1

I am and for a very long time already have been a die-hard SUSE user. However, most Linux people in my workplace are using Ubuntu.

Now that the Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope was released and my friend updated his laptop with it, I was excited to also try it out as it looked really good. The Gnome that comes with openSUSE somehow did not look that good...

Over the time I've almost always used KDE. I feel quite the same as Linus has once said - Gnome has taken the wrong turn in over simplifying its user interface. Over simplifying to the extent of removing also most of the necessary power-user stuff.

Unfortunately, nowadays the KDE 4 has also taken this bad route of over-simplifying the UI and probably for that cause, the KDE 4 team has re-written from the scratch many of the major KDE tools, such as Kate and KWrite, KDialog, Gwenview, Konsole, Amarok and many others. The new versions of the KDE 4 apps look, feel and are as useful as the namesakes of them at the time the KDE 2 started - raw and lacking many important features that I have grown accustomed to, plus introducing horde of bugs which should not be there at this point - an example would be KDialog, the new version of which does not return the correct response if you used only keyboard for selecting the button - with mouse it works, but not with keyboard. The old KDE 3.5 version, of course, works like a charm no matter how you use it.

One thing I found unbelievable in 64bit Ubuntu is the total lack of 32bit binary execution support out of the box. No 32bit ELF binary will run - bash, for example, says that the file you are trying to execute is not even there!
According to AMD64FirefoxAndPlugins page, in order to get the 32bit support you have to install several additional packages by hand and in order to run any 32bit binary you (apparently) need to modify some environment variables as well (better make a script). Additionally, for 32bit Firefox to be able to resolve names, you need some more installations to do.

Why on earth did the Ubuntu distro managers not create a normal dual architecture environment like openSUSE has - general 32bit support is given out of the box without any library path fiddling and only in case of more specific applications you need to select also the 32bit versions of any libraries they need.

Out of the box, there is one area where Ubuntu fares better than openSUSE - printers. I have two USB printers attached - an Epson Stylus Photo R220 and HP LaserJet 1020. Ubuntu noticed both of them, installing the Epson printer automatically with zero questions and for HP LaserJet only asking permission to install proprietary plugin direct from HP. Both work normally and to my biggest surprise, you can configure a ton of things for both printers including the CD printing capabilities of my Epson printer.

Right from the start I decided that I can not and will not use only Gnome tools and apps - I need at least Krusader, Gwenview, K3B, Konsole and KWrite. And I need the KDE 3.5 version of these apps - the ones that work as I've gotten used to. Again, out of the box there is no way to get KDE 3.5 apps. Fortunately there is the Pearson Computing KDE3.5 Repository for Ubuntu Intrepid and Above, which has a repository enabling the installation of KDE 3.5.10 environment and applications.

Another area where Ubuntu surprised me positively was the fact that KDE trash location was the same as the Gnome trash location. Deleting a file into trash from Krusader made it appear in Gnome's Trashcan... freedesktop.org has done a great job in unifying these two rivals making life easier for users of both.

So far so good, the system seems stable, printers work, audio works, my 32bit work environment (Java 6, Eclipse 3.4, Flex Builder, Firefox with Flash) is also working... so I guess I'll continue this experiment for a while longer.

How to make KPrinter work with Firefox 3?

openSUSE 11.1

In the recent past there have been several new software updates and upgrades which have almost infuriated me and forced me to revert to using old versions. The top two of these new things are:

1. Firefox 3 which cannot be persuaded to use kprinter anymore the way Firefox 2 was persuaded.


2. KDE 4 and its applications which totally and absolutely ignore the KDE 3 configuration with no apparent way to migrate the configuration either. Fortunately openSUSE still carries KDE 3.5 which I'm using currently.

The first of these items, however, is solved now, and here are the steps I took to make kprinter work with Firefox 3 (inspired by a post from this thread):

1. The first step is to edit the file /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc and add the following line to the end:
   

   gtk-print-backends = "lpr,file"

   
   This will make the lpr target appear in the Firefox 3 print dialog.


2. The second step is to switch the lpr command for kprinter command by executing:
   

   cd ~/bin
   ln -s `which kprinter` lpr
   



3. And the third and final step is to get rid of the Firefox 3 print dialog by opening the URL about:config and creating there the following new Boolean option:
   

   print.always_print_silent = true

And that's it - Firefox 3 now prints directly to kprinter.

NB! The only quirk I've found is that you cannot cancel the kprinter dialog - or it will hang Firefox 3 for some reason.

EDIT: After some testing, however, this way of printing seems to be very buggy - most pictures do not print at all and those that do end up on the printed page are heavily compressed with visible compression artifacts, the text is uneven and looks ugly.
It seems that the LPR printing uses the lowest possible resolution with no known way to fix this higher.

I've switched back to Firefox 2.0.0.20 for now until the Firefox 3 will play nice within KDE!