SuSE 8.2 -- better than Mandrake for new users? (NewsForge)

Posted May 17, 2003 16:48 UTC (Sat) by gargamel (guest, #10918) [Link]

I've been using SuSE Linux 8.2 for several weeks now. I've used SuSE distros since
version 5.0 and occasionally experiment with other distros. One of the strengths of SuSE
*is* their support database, and another is the excellent documentation. No other
distribution I know of comes with such a good set of manuals. Especially the administration
handbook is really, really excellent, and hardly matched by books available on the market.
On the other hand SuSE has been criticised for YaST, their graphical installation and
administration tool. Some of the criticism was about the philosophy; if you like graphical
tools, you might like YaST, if you are a command line guru, then you might have hated it, in
the past; but some of the criticism was based on and justified by real (and occasionally
severe) bugs.

Now, in version 8.2 they have cleaned up everything. You can use YaST and the
command line interchangeably, as it is now very clear what YaST actually does and does
not: New explanation texts in the tool make it clear.

But even command line fans might like this tool now: It's the first thing of its kind that works
flawlessy, I've seen!

And that holds for the whole distro: It's the first OS, I have *ever* used, that doesn't show
even minor inconsistencies!
This package looks mature, and the quality of it is just *convincing*. If you want to use your
system for getting your job done, instead of heaving the system eating up your time, while
you are trying to figure out how to fix this little snag, I really can recommend SuSE 8.2 to
*anyone*: end-users, administrators and developers.

And no: I'm not on SuSE's payroll... ;-)

Alex Bär