With all the hype about Ubuntu .... or rather Kubuntu w/ KDE4 coming soon, Suse was the distro that got away. At one time it was on top, and then when Novell signed its soul away to Redmond Suse became the bastard child of the linux underworld.
This is not the first time I've posted here about Suse. In fact, many of you may remember that I have previously bashed this distro to hell
. I've tried every major release since 9.1 (including 9.3, 10.0, 10.1 and 10.2) and every single one of them never failed to disappoint. The 9.x series had messed up issues with my sound and graphics (why was intel 8x0 freaken ac97 sound so hard to configure? isn't it the generic of the most generic?). 10.0 Had the same issues as 9.x but also had ungodly long boot time (if you thought Ubuntu was slow to boot...double that and then some). 10.1 and 10.2 fixed the sound/graphics issues but introduced Zen which as you may know was broken beyond all hell making package management a nightmare. Long boot time was still an issue. Finally we got 10.3.... sound works, boot time is reasonable, package manager not broken. Can this be? An actual usable Suse?
Why I installed Suse 10.3 Gnome (CD version):
Got frustrated w/ not being able to get Counter Strike running under wine, and I lost my XP disk, so I installed Vista. Had Vista for about a week while i got my CSS fix. That was a brutal and painful experience. After I decided to kill vista I checked Distrowatch and saw PCLOS 2008 MiniMe was out...and decided to send it for a spin. Came out somewhat disappointed (waiting for the Full edition of PCLOS 2008..hopefully w/ KDE4), so decided to try out Fedora 8. Fedora to its true nature was a whole bunch of fail. Then i didn't feel like waiting for a huge iso to d/l so i went through the stack of recently burned distros I have...suse 10.3 happened to be one that caught my attention so I figured why the hell not.
Anyway... what can I say. So far (granted its only been a few hours) I am fairly satisfied. Hardware recognition out of the box was good for the most part. Needed to manually adjust the resolution from 1024x768 to 1280x800 though. Then there was no recognition of my wireless (madwifi)...otherwise it was good. So i hooked up my lan (sis900 which worked), added some repos to my repo list (including the madwifi repo) and installed the madwifi package (which for some reason pulled in fglrx as a dependency..doesn't matter since i was gonna get fglrx anyway). Since a kernel update was needed as well... a reboot later my wireless was working (as well as my video) and I was in order. I must say I am fairly pleased w/ Suse's new package manager. I wouldn't say its better than my personal favorite pacman (on arch linux), or even APT (my 2nd best pick) but unlike zen it actually works very well and fairly quick (faster than YUM or URPMI). Then I went back to the community repos and installed flash, java, media codecs, browser plugins, etc... again fairly quick and painless procedure. Not as straight forward as say Automatix...but easier than on some other distros i've seen.
As always, the default theme looks really good. You got your green wallpaper and the lizard logo. Clean lines, no gaudy anything, good icon theme. One concern is the use of SLAB... although it looks kinda cool, I find it much less practical than the default Gnome menus. I always find myself in the More Applications menu looking for other things...who knows, maybe once my frequently used apps make it on the Favorite Apps menu and I will no longer have the need to keep going into different settings/utils/configs I won't be hitting the "More Applications" button quite as much.
Speed is important to me. Speed is my #1 concern about Ubuntu...and thus my not using it. Suse has also generally been on the slow side (side note: Fedora 8 is really slow) but this release is not too bad. Not quite as snappy as PCLOS2007 but quick enough where I don't sit around twiddling my thumbs waiting for Firefox to open.
I am not gonna say... go try Suse 10.3 b/c its the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I will tell you that its not bad. So basically if you are bored, looking for something new, or just wanna kill some time till Ubuntu 8.04 is out...give this distro a spin.
This is not the first time I've posted here about Suse. In fact, many of you may remember that I have previously bashed this distro to hell
. I've tried every major release since 9.1 (including 9.3, 10.0, 10.1 and 10.2) and every single one of them never failed to disappoint. The 9.x series had messed up issues with my sound and graphics (why was intel 8x0 freaken ac97 sound so hard to configure? isn't it the generic of the most generic?). 10.0 Had the same issues as 9.x but also had ungodly long boot time (if you thought Ubuntu was slow to boot...double that and then some). 10.1 and 10.2 fixed the sound/graphics issues but introduced Zen which as you may know was broken beyond all hell making package management a nightmare. Long boot time was still an issue. Finally we got 10.3.... sound works, boot time is reasonable, package manager not broken. Can this be? An actual usable Suse?Why I installed Suse 10.3 Gnome (CD version):
Got frustrated w/ not being able to get Counter Strike running under wine, and I lost my XP disk, so I installed Vista. Had Vista for about a week while i got my CSS fix. That was a brutal and painful experience. After I decided to kill vista I checked Distrowatch and saw PCLOS 2008 MiniMe was out...and decided to send it for a spin. Came out somewhat disappointed (waiting for the Full edition of PCLOS 2008..hopefully w/ KDE4), so decided to try out Fedora 8. Fedora to its true nature was a whole bunch of fail. Then i didn't feel like waiting for a huge iso to d/l so i went through the stack of recently burned distros I have...suse 10.3 happened to be one that caught my attention so I figured why the hell not.
Anyway... what can I say. So far (granted its only been a few hours) I am fairly satisfied. Hardware recognition out of the box was good for the most part. Needed to manually adjust the resolution from 1024x768 to 1280x800 though. Then there was no recognition of my wireless (madwifi)...otherwise it was good. So i hooked up my lan (sis900 which worked), added some repos to my repo list (including the madwifi repo) and installed the madwifi package (which for some reason pulled in fglrx as a dependency..doesn't matter since i was gonna get fglrx anyway). Since a kernel update was needed as well... a reboot later my wireless was working (as well as my video) and I was in order. I must say I am fairly pleased w/ Suse's new package manager. I wouldn't say its better than my personal favorite pacman (on arch linux), or even APT (my 2nd best pick) but unlike zen it actually works very well and fairly quick (faster than YUM or URPMI). Then I went back to the community repos and installed flash, java, media codecs, browser plugins, etc... again fairly quick and painless procedure. Not as straight forward as say Automatix...but easier than on some other distros i've seen.
As always, the default theme looks really good. You got your green wallpaper and the lizard logo. Clean lines, no gaudy anything, good icon theme. One concern is the use of SLAB... although it looks kinda cool, I find it much less practical than the default Gnome menus. I always find myself in the More Applications menu looking for other things...who knows, maybe once my frequently used apps make it on the Favorite Apps menu and I will no longer have the need to keep going into different settings/utils/configs I won't be hitting the "More Applications" button quite as much.
Speed is important to me. Speed is my #1 concern about Ubuntu...and thus my not using it. Suse has also generally been on the slow side (side note: Fedora 8 is really slow) but this release is not too bad. Not quite as snappy as PCLOS2007 but quick enough where I don't sit around twiddling my thumbs waiting for Firefox to open.
I am not gonna say... go try Suse 10.3 b/c its the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I will tell you that its not bad. So basically if you are bored, looking for something new, or just wanna kill some time till Ubuntu 8.04 is out...give this distro a spin.
