Why OpenSuSE?
It is true that I've used Ubuntu and KUbuntu for other books in this series. While that set of Linux distros may be the most famous, they've taken some shortcuts to target the now disappearing NetBook market which has established a sunset date for Ubuntu as well. There is a real problem with their distribution methodology which is forcing some incredibly bad design decisions into that distro. If you mandate that your initial “live” version fit on a single CD instead of a DVD, you are going to make an awful lot of bad decisions due to that initial bad decision.
OpenSuSe comes on a DVD, or a thumb drive, and in other methods which allow for much more than just a single CD's worth of storage. Because of this you don't see a different release of OpenSuSE for each potential Linux desktop. Not only are these desktops all available on your initial installation media, they are actually tested together. I cannot tell you the number of times I was using one flavor of Ubuntu but needed something written for one of the other flavors to make my life easier, then had lots of things stop working correctly once the other 700MEG was downloaded to support the other desktop. When you posted a support issue, you were quite honestly told “don't do that” and the issue was closed.
Another reason we are using OpenSuSE instead of Ubuntu is that the support people actually care. I have wasted hundreds of hours in email arguments with the supposed powers that be in Ubuntu land pointing out massive technical flaws due primarily to their genetic inability to grasp technical topics. Quite recently one of these cerebral giants told me they were going to simply close without comment bug reports I was filing about their forcing all things Qt to use database plugins instead of compiled in connections “because plugins were more secure.” The English language simply does not have the ability to accurately describe the depth of that stupidity, and this was the person in charge! Definitely promoted to their level of inability! I didn't ask them, but they sure sounded like an MBA from Keller! That level of incompetence is the norm for graduates of that school in my experience.
For those of you who do not comprehend the security hole Open Source plugins create, imagine if some Russian mafia family, or Chinese Triad, or some other organized crime entity takes it upon themselves to write a custom version of each plugin for each release. The custom version adds the “feature” of logging all table layouts and I/O to the “temp” directory, then queuing a task at program exit to transmit this information to a server of theirs somewhere on the Web.
The crime family then “donate” a lot of time to various Open Source projects loading these plugins into the distributions. Nobody notices any difference because they have only added a logging and delayed transmit feature. The crime family ends up with every record written to every database using those plugins on every system containing them. Yes, they end up with a lot of chicken recipies and music catalogs, but, eventually they start getting the records for various Open Source competitors to Quicken, QuickBooks, Seible, etc. Now they have current balance and account information and possibly even identies. All that is necessary to stop this from happening is to statically compile in the database