Five things I dislike about SUSE 10 (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Five things I dislike about SUSE 10 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2006 8:29 UTC (Thu) by dale77 (subscriber, #1490)
Parent article: Five things I dislike about SUSE 10 (Linux.com)

I agree with his conclusion. I purchased the retail version ahead of the release, doing my bit for desktop linux with some cash. After the event, I have a bitter taste in my mouth.

First up, I was disappointed by the overall polish of the "look" of the packaged and installed distro. I had Suse 9.3 at work, and that was better IMHO. Funny that 10.0 seemed a retro step... I was further surprized that you could download the *retail* Suse10 for free soon after the release. Why did I pay for this?

I had software problems out of the box. Tomcat wouldn't start, due to config problems, and my default install left out some artsd libraries that caused very nasty problems with some KDE games.

Since I paid for a few days for support I thought I'd try it out. My first response from Novell was civil, if not helpful, I had to sort it out myself. My second query, about how to install OOO 2 from a downloaded rpm got a "sorry we don't support upgrades to the system". I explained that said rpm was available from YOU as a security patch but the "support" guy still told me to go jump. By the way yast had refused to install the rpm from the GUI, I eventually figured out I could manually install it via the console and yast2 -i.

Suse 10 has been a fairly large disappointment to this user, particularly the obnoxious support I paid for. Support is probably the biggest non-altruistic reason to actually buy a linux distro IMHO, Novell dropped the ball big time with me.

Novell's recent decision to desupport KDE on the desktop is probably the final push to move me on. Where to next is the $64,000 question. Any suggestions? My only experience with Gnome has been non-functioning Suse versions, and a staid but solid Red Hat AS corporate system. Gnome appears to suck on the desktop to this user, but has KDE lost its biggest prop in Suse?

Dale

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Five things I dislike about SUSE 10 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2006 9:31 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

Well, SUSE's Gnome is indeed more or less broken, only 10.0 showed at least some improvement but it still sucked (menus for example). You could try Ubuntu for a smoother Gnome experience, or perhaps Fedora. Anyway, the OpenSUSE continues to use KDE as the default desktop, so the support isn't going away. And I _think_ that SUSE's KDE support is still more mature/integrated than (K)Ubuntu's KDE support (though I don't nowadays use KDE much, but I used to).

Five things I dislike about SUSE 10 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 11, 2006 10:40 UTC (Sat) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link]

I heard from some openSUSE users, that in the upcoming release Gnome will in fact be the default GUI, i.e. it will be "the first one on the list". As a disgruntled Mandriva user I'm interested in this too, could someone have an opinion on which story has more truth to it?

Also, what is the state for us KDE users these days? I know Mandriva is simply not up to the task, I've been disappointed with their quality one time too many. SUSE was the one great KDE distro around, now they took that away from us. Novell might not be trumpeting it out yet, but Ximian clearly defines the Novell desktops from now on, everything else they say is just politics and diplomacy. What is the state of Kubuntu? For instance, does anyone have an idea of the ratio of Ubuntu vs Kubuntu users? Finally, what is the favorite distro among KDE developers these days?

There are multiple Linux installations/upgrades scheduled in my family for this year, I'd be interested to know.