As a North American (USA) who has been running Red Hat since 1998 and since this July has also been running SuSE, my 2 cents worth. I don't believe in a "best" distribution, but SuSE is as fine a distribution as any I've used. I was lucky back in 98 with my Red Hat setup in that by dumb luck unbeknownest to me all my hardware happened to be compatible and so without even knowing what I was doing at the time I just had to learn about disk druid & the concept of mount points and first time out I had a nice Red Hat 5.0 setup with X configured properly, the whole enchilada! Interestingly enough, 2 years later when I installed SuSE Yast2 kept bombing on the same hardware when it came time to configure my video card and set up X. Most other modern distributions also do this though since my card is an old Trident that should'nt be auto probed and most modern installers for some reason freeze up when they blindly DO probe it. One hip thing about Yast2 though is that it's scripted to go right back to where it left off when you have to hard boot out of a freeze up so I just took a different option the second time around and installed X later. On the whole due to my older vintage hardware, I had to use my Linux savvy to get SuSE just the way I wanted it; a newbie would'nt have gotten a good setup out of it with the same hardware. Later on as I read through the manual and excellent on disk help files SuSE provides I did get hip to the SuSE way and at this point I have a great SuSE system that mostly purrs right along. As far as the kernel goes though there IS that one problem. If you want to use the commercial oss driver provided with your distribution you seem to pretty much have to stay with the same version kernel that comes with your setup (2.2.14 for 6.4). On my Red Hat 6.0 setup I'm running the 2.2.16 kernel, but on my SuSE 6.4 setup I just recompiled the 2.2.14 kernel to throw out the stuff I don't use and speed it up a bit. Even then, the oss driver would'nt set up properly; as a work around I kept a lilo setting for the stock SuSE kernel and reset up oss with that; then when I lilo'd over to my home brewed kernel oss worked fine. On the whole my experience with SuSE is that I had to tweak away on it here and there to get it useable, but it DID shape up nicely and does almost everything my Red Hat setup does. This is pretty amazing when you consider that I have been "tweaking" away on my Red Hat setup for over a year to get it to the state it's in now (and it is SWEET ) but it only took a couple a' weeks to get SuSE to more or less the same state. If you want to always run the latest kernel with SuSE though I guess you need to use alsa as your sound driver or shell out some $$ to oss.
Ralf Corsepius wrote:
In my opinion I believe that SuSE needs to refocus on your QC if you are to gain market share particularly in North America.
.. and Germany is the proverbial "service desert", SCNR :) [There is always a point of truth in any proverb :]
Well, the proverb is not true. Ask any German who lives in the US for a while, I mean really "living" here, that measn you have to do the everyday stuff, like paying bills, etc., and don't just stay in a company apartment and don't care about the daily stuff. I can tell you I sometimes feel like I'm abck in the sixties (ok, I was born in 72). You send checks(!) via snail mail(!!) and when they get lost(!!!) they turn your phone connection off from one day to the next. And try to get this fixed, it's like talking to robots. In Germany they may not sound very nice, but they actually HELP when this should happen (well, we've computers, and the first time in my live I sent money via the Psot Office was ii this country). Speak of service.
Did I now open the next very long thread of discussion?
To make it good: I prefer the attitude of the people in general in this country, so it looks like I've gotta live with those robot-service drones around here.
The majority of people that I've heard says the exact opposite. The majority of people will tell you that the VW Beetle was a terrific car and that MS Win is the best OS :)
The difference is that in our example all know the product they're talking about, while in your example they only know the one they recommend.
Anyway, I basically share Ron's and Gerry's opinion about SuSE having a QC problem and about experiencing a drop in quality over the years.
Don't get me wrong, a distribution like SuSE is complex, therefore nobody expects it to be 100% perfect.
However, there is no point in reacting overly arrogant, aggressive or in trying to argue over details. SuSE's marketing has raised high expectations, SuSE had set high standards with previous versions, SuSE seems to have problems in keeping the pace, there is a Linux hype going on, the Linux community has changed, ... and SuSE has changed, too.
So simply read this as "Some customers complain about a drop in quality in SuSE distributions and we (SuSE) should care about it".
They're working on making it even better. And I'm only 1/500+ of SuSE, by the way. and I DO believe we've got the highest quality distribution of them all.
-- Michael Hasenstein http://www.suse.de/~mha/ SuSE Linux AG, Nuernberg (Germany) SuSE Inc., Oakland, California (US)
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