Tried it.

Story: OpenSuSE 10.3 is outTotal Replies: 13
Author Content
salparadise

Oct 07, 2007
9:10 PM EDT
Hated it.

They ought to be done for defamation of the name Linux.
herzeleid

Oct 07, 2007
9:44 PM EDT
I installed it too, and like it a lot - I haven't found any distro as nice - but feel free to turn me on to a better all-around distro, because if there is one, I'm there. But hey, different strokes for different folks - Just out of curiosity, was there something in particular about it that displeased you? What install did you do, the one-disk gnome, the one-disk kde, the net install, ore the full dvd?

BTW I've been running linux at work and at home since 1993. The list of distros I've used includes sls, slackware, debian, redhat, fedora, caldera, turbolinux. mandrake, ubuntu, suse and others, as well as various other unices e.g. sunos, solaris, irix, next, osx, freebsd, netbsd, hpux, aix.

Do tell, inquiring minds want to know!
dinotrac

Oct 08, 2007
3:23 AM EDT
herzelaid -

Is it better than 10.2? Most important -- Have they done anything to return Yast to its nimbler glory days?
herzeleid

Oct 08, 2007
8:43 AM EDT
Quoting: Is it better than 10.2? Most important -- Have they done anything to return Yast to its nimbler glory days?
I upgraded some boxes at home this weekend, and 10.3 is snappier than 10.2. I was bitten though, by a couple of changes that won't affect most users -

I have a high availability cluster at home with both boxes originally running 10.2, and my plan was to upgrade one box at a time to 10.3, while keeping the highly available service up and running. Unfortunately drbd was changed from version 0.7 to 0.8, and the method for creating permanent network interface names was changed in 10.3. So, the server could not stay up. Both boxes had to come up to 10.3, update drbd and update the ethernet names.

I haven't found any downside on the desktop yet - of the 2 boxes I upgraded, one has onboard intel video, the other has an nvidia card, and both are working wonderfully.

As for yast, I'm assuming you mean online update? It looks to be an incremental improvement, as there was going from 10.1 to 10.2 -
salparadise

Oct 08, 2007
9:13 AM EDT
A most ridiculous post. My apologies.

My experience with SuSE has been that it has idiosyncrasies that can be hugely annoying. I tried 10.3 just to see what it was like and ran into another SuSE thing.

And probably posted in anger - a silly thing to do at any time.
dinotrac

Oct 08, 2007
9:15 AM EDT
>I'm assuming you mean online update?

Oh yeah. The work of the devil, so far as I can tell. Even regular software management is way too piggy/pokey on 10.2, at least if you've added a few installation sources.
herzeleid

Oct 08, 2007
10:50 AM EDT
Quoting: My experience with SuSE has been that it has idiosyncrasies that can be hugely annoying. I tried 10.3 just to see what it was like and ran into another SuSE thing.
No worries Sal -

but I am curious about what issues you ran into. All data points are useful, so I'm all ears. i don't want to be ignorant of any possible gotchas that I haven't seen. I may be automatically moving through some details by virtue of a few years of suse experience, that someone else might have a problem with.
salparadise

Oct 08, 2007
1:20 PM EDT
My computer has three hard drives, two SATA and one IDE. Having run into problems with GRUB before, I've learned to disconnect the two extras during installation. Then, once the OS is in place I can add the two drives and edit /etc/fstab to sort them out for mount points and so on. On Ubuntu/Linux Mint/PCLinuxOS/Fedora/Slackware this is straight forward. On SuSE, when I booted with the extra drives installed I got a screen full of 9's. What got me was the sheer hopelessness of it. So SuSE can't cope with having extra drives added after installation without GRUB falling over? I nearly threw the pc across the room but settled instead for dumping the cd in the bin and reinstalling PCLinuxOS.

Like I say - SuSE - slick looking but a bit clunky underneath. I always thought Mandrake was FAR superior.

I really miss Mandrake.
tracyanne

Oct 08, 2007
1:26 PM EDT
Quoting:I really miss Mandrake.


Fear not... Mandrake changed it's name to .... ta da... Mandriva.
herzeleid

Oct 08, 2007
2:33 PM EDT
Sal - sounds like an odd corner case -

As far as that other thing goes, my experience with mandrake was that it was very cute but flaky, whereas suse was cute and solid. YMMV though, as I'm sure tracyanne will tell you ;)
salparadise

Oct 08, 2007
9:04 PM EDT
Quoting:Fear not... Mandrake changed it's name to .... ta da... Mandriva


Yes I know. It was shortly after that that I ran away. Something awful happened around the time they changed their name.

And then Ubuntu came out.

Still, now I'm using PXLinuxOS I guess the circle is closed.

Until the next shiny new distro comes out...
gus3

Oct 08, 2007
10:32 PM EDT
During my Silicon Valley tenure, very SuSE I tried acted clunky. I hated having to support it. However, I did give kudos to one of our sales guys who created a YaST front-end to our product. We were impress!
tracyanne

Oct 09, 2007
1:53 AM EDT
Quoting: Until the next shiny new distro comes out...


Mandriva 2008.0 is here, I've, finally, got my copy from the mirrors. She installed and saw that it was good.

They made several changes, including the new fast install, where you have the option of installing a KDE desktop or Gnome, or the Custom install (which is like the old install, where you select which bits you want). The layout of the post install has changed, things seem to be in a more logical order, grouped into common functional areas. The First time wizard has changed, and I think to a confusing worse, it seems to be in French, even though I've set up for Australian English. There's a new menu structure available, similar to the SuSE one - I hate it, but you can easily switch back to the old KDE style menu. The Mandriva Control Centre (drakconf) has changed - Software Mangement is better laid out, and the redundant remove Software option has gone, in fact the whole layout on drakconf is more logical and better labeled. All in all I think they've produced a very nice distro that improves on 2007.1.
herzeleid

Oct 09, 2007
9:52 AM EDT
Quoting: During my Silicon Valley tenure, very SuSE I tried acted clunky. I hated having to support it.
When I first saw suse it was perhaps a bit clunky, back in the 5.x days. I was a redhat user at that time, but I kept an eye on other distros, including mandrake, suse, caldera, etc. By the suse 8.x days, I noticed that suse "just worked" where redhat needed a lot of tweaks. For instance: plug a usb stick in a suse box, a file manager pops up, showing the contents of the usb stick, ready for drag and drop, or double click any file to open. OTOH, plug a usb stick into a redhat box and... nothing happened.

Printing to a windoze attached printer from linux showed a similar contrast between suse and redhat. Nonetheless, I still soldiered on with redhat. But when suse 9.1 came out (first major distro to move to the 2.6 kernel), it was so good I had to switch. I've looked around at other distros since then e.g. ubuntu and other debian derivatives, and each has it's own issues. I'm open to a better distro, but I haven't seen any.

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