I read a lot of negativity about YaST on the webs, Reddit, YouTubes… other places… and I wanted to write a counter to all those negative statements. Why? YaST was the biggest selling point for me to go openSUSE when I departed the Mandrake / Mandriva world about 10 years ago (at the time of writing). I use YaST regularly and have grown to truly enjoy the tools for system administration. I am not good at remembering the various commands in the terminal to do a thing even though I do take a number of notes. YaST is just so quick to get to a solution, especially when there are lots of little steps involved. I originally was going to make it 8 reasons, then 10 but after getting to 16, I decided I had to pare it down and will probably have to do follow up blatherings on the various modules. Here are my reasons why YaST makes openSUSE Awesome.
Consolidated Control Center of Tools
This is my primary love for YaST. I know I can go to one place and get to any system level function for my computer. I have this general requirement that I want all my tools in one spot, I do not want to have to hunt for the proper tool to accomplish a specified task, with YaST, I get that and managing my openSUSE machines is super convenient. I don’t have to remember any esoteric commands in the terminal, as much as I love the terminal and the power it provides. I often cannot remember the commands to fix or alter a thing. This is especially true with functions I do not perform regularly.
openSUSE set the standard for me with YaST, for me to consider any Linux distribution, I must have a “Control Center” for all my system management tools. Basically, at this point, I am spoiled and although I can get along fine with other distributions, I never feel fully comfortable with a system that doesn’t have this luxury item.
