GeckoLinux | A User Friendly Alternative To openSUSE

GeckoLinux is a distribution based on openSUSE. It aims to make itself different from openSUSE by delivering a more user friendly experience out of the box. To achieve this it uses additional repositories and has media codecs pre-installed. GeckoLinux also drops the standard openSUSE installer in favour of a live environment where you can install the distro via Calamares. They offer images based on both Tumbleweed and Leap which allows users to choose from a rolling or static release model. You can download a number of different pre-packaged ISO's with various desktops on offer. In this video I take a quick look at their rolling release using the GNOME desktop environment.

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[s.b.]

Hi there (Tyler I assume?), GeckoLinux creator here. Thanks a lot for the review, well done! So you ran into the Gnome truncated app names... :-/ There's two of us. Regarding the Numix GTK theme, here's the thing: I'm fanatical about readable fonts with good color contrast, and Numix is by far the best one in that sense that comes with openSUSE. I limited myself to the themes that come packaged with openSUSE, because I don't want to start creating RPM packages for GeckoLinux, I prefer for it to be pure openSUSE/Packman. So that's why Numix is used. Apart from that, I didn't see any point in including a lot of other wallpapers and icon packs, since people just add/remove/change them anyway according to their personal preferences. ;-) I would have liked to include the user-themes extension for Gnome too, it's in the repos but unfortunately it doesn't work. As for the AWOL wallpaper, it's in /usr/share/wallpapers ;-) I totally agree with most of your comments about the idiosyncrasies of Gnome, I tried to polish as many of them as possible, but I figured that I'd leave it the way it is because Gnome users generally like it the way it is, and I don't like shipping extensions that aren't packaged in the openSUSE repos. Thanks for testing the hibernation feature, I'm glad it basically worked. It's never fast in Linux, I'd be surprised if it took any more or less time with GeckoLinux compared to other distros, but I'd be interested to know if you have any hard numbers to compare. No idea what happened with Firefox... Thanks again for the review!

[christophertodd]

Ive been using Gecko Tumbleweed Plasma for a couple of months now and I really like it. Its installed on an old Dell Latitude E5530. I haven't had any of the issues you had with Gnome. I haven't had any problems at all, for that-matter. The caveat being that I never use hibernate. Over the years I have had nothing but bad experiences with hibernate, so I don't even try to use it. I find I get along fine without it. I really enjoy your videos. Keep it up.

[torque]

18:00 the option to disable the hot corner is right there in Tweaks (under Top Bar)

[evr-grn]

Very nice! I'm glad to see that OpenSUSE is becoming more user-friendly, as it's a very nice and polished distro.

[JonathanSinger]

There is a setting called "Activities Overview Hot Corner" under the "Top Bar" category in GNOME Tweaks, which should disable the hot corner when toggled off, so no need for that extension!

[alexbstinson]

I’m excited about the 5 year feren review. Keep it coming Tyler.

[millankumar]

15:13 What is that Wall paper called? I like the design on the right, and I think I could 'gimp' it as an overlay to a different wallpaper

[narenchris]

if i'm set up my drive manually, do i need to create an EFI partition, because i'm installing this os with legacy/UEFI bios and i have some trouble with EFI partition on some linux distro

[millankumar]

Can you look at Gentoo?I feel like it is an under underappreciated distro, it has so much flexibility, but it has a high skill entry,

[kriskruz]

Thanks for uploading. Will give this a try..

[alanwalker]

Hi would this method of installing a distro work doing a full install to a usb ??? tks

[johanb.]

And I don't like the rounded corners and the rounded searchbar in Chrome and in the latest Whisker menu. I absolutely hate that.

[jayrowe]

I thought OpenSUSE was already user friendly.