Application Complication

Linux is not upgrade friendly. Atleast for someone not keen on learning the intricacies of the OS.

If you are seeking a simple route to adding applications, you will find that some distros are better that others in this task, and some application packages are not compatible with some distros due to the different package format.
A package format is something new for Linux users. You have RPM format, a DEB format and a GZ format and a TAR format. And probably one more which I can't recall.
RPM is a format native to Red Hat and allied distros. Red Hat Package Management (RPM) is probably the most popular formats. DEB is for Debian and allied distros. The advantage of these formats is that they allow click and install ease. Unfortunately, this is easier said that experienced. The TAR and GZ formats are compressed formats like ZIP and RAR in Windows. One needs to be extracted, and then contents managed.

OpenSuse is one from the RPM lobby. Being an Opera - the browser - fanatic, I tried installing Opera to the newly installed OS. The Opera site lists atleast a dozen different Linux distros, and each distro is futher divided into a clutch of version. After selecting the Opensuse 10.3 download option, I could get the rpm package. Twice double clicking on the RPM packages produced a few popping windows and then nothing. The default installation manager YAST or YAST2 seems to be crashing. Right clicking on the RPM produced an option to "Install with YAST". This time the diagnosis was that the installation cannot proceed since there was a dependent file missing. A libstdc++ file was missing. A search in the install programs applet showed that the file was already present. And it was the latest version with no scope for updating.

The other option was to download the gz package. After the download and extract, clicking on the Opera shell script .sh file (probably the equivalent of the exe or bat format in Windows) resulted in ..nothing. There was also an install.sh file, which also accomplished nothing.
Hmm. Right clicking on the file did not offer an expected "run in terminal" option, since a shell is personalised in a terminal. Cul de sac.