Hiya! Warning: this mail is long-winded. If you're not up to reading a very long post, then don't bother - delete it now. ------------------------------------------------ A bit of background: One of the things i've always loved about Suse, and boasted about to anyone who's asked me why i use it, is that i can pop in the installation DVD and be back online and working again within an hour or so. Back in the old days, when i used to love to spend 2 days configuring my box after each new installation, that wasn't a concern. But as i've matured [i.e., grown old] and Linux has become my primary OS, both at work and at home, getting and staying online and functional has become my priority. Suse has always been good at that. Turn it on and it just works [the vast majority of the time]. i switched from Slackware to Suse in the summer of 1998 (6.0, i think) and i've used only Suse since then. i've experimented with other distros, but never for more than a couple days before switching back to Suse. Debian, for example, is simply a pain in the butt to get working for desktop use. RedHat has, and always will, suck. ArkLinux is nice and ultra-optimized for speed but is missing a large package repository (maybe not true, but it's missing XEmacs packages, and that's my primary programming tool). Ubuntu is colorful and nice looking, but based on Gnome, which i hate with a deep-seated passion. So i decided to give Kubuntu a try. For those who don't know, Kubuntu is basically Ubuntu with a default desktop of KDE instead of Gnome. Over the years i've contributed, on and off, to the Suse newsgroups and lists such as this one. In fact, i'll also claim that the hostname that you see in the yast titlebar ("Yast @ myhost") is my feature. It was added to yast a couple weeks after a sent a bug report to Suse asking them to add it because i had accidentally installed software on the wrong machine when i had yast open on two remote boxes at once and got the windows mixed up. (Before the hostname was there, it was easy to confuse multiple yast instances running on different machines.) i tell you this not to brag, but to put my long history with Suse into perspective, so as to proactively dispel any ideas that i'm unfairly criticising Suse here. ------------------------------------------------ Now, what this mail is all about: After some Grief with the Suse 10.1 packaging tools, i bit the bullet and installed Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org) on my laptop. Here i'd like to give a quick overview of what i now feel Suse is doing right and where it could improve, compared specifically with Kubuntu. In the past i was unable to make such a comparison because i was so caught up in my Suse-blindness. Suse's good, but my recent frustration with it led me astray, and this is the result... [Had i never upgraded from 10.0 to 10.1, i almost certainly would not be writing this...] ------------------------------------------------ What Suse does RIGHT: - Administration of network services, e.g. Samba, DNS, etc, is incredibly well done in Suse. It's soooo simple to set this stuff up in Yast. (And to THINK, i used to LOVE editing those config files by hand!) - The modularity of Yast makes it easy for Suse to add news tools to the tried and true Yast interface, both in curses mode and X11 mode. This makes new features easy to find, compared to a hodge-podge of various tools scattered around the system. - Setting up network devices is trivial with yast. i'd have never figured out how to get my DSL connection working if not for yast. - The SuseFirewall. Simplicity and effectiveness at its best. Were it not for the SuseFirewall, i would probably disconnect my DSL line between each click i make in my browser, simply out of paranoia. - The installation process is pretty damned good. Kubuntu's X11-based installer crashed near the end, leaving my system unbootable. The text-based installer was much closer to what i am used to with Yast, in terms of features, though yast does provide the user with many more options (e.g. selecting your screen resolution for X11, whereas Kubuntu simply selects the highest resolution your chipset can support). ------------------------------------------------ What Suse could DO BETTER: - SIMPLE documentation. IMO, Wikis are HORRIBLE means of documentation except in some unusual circumstances (and i can't think of a good use case for a wiki, to be honest). They are, almost without exception, butt-ugly, hard to weed through, and are notorious for having out of date or duplicated entries (each of various quality). By comparison, Kubuntu's online manual is a dream come true: http://doc.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/desktopguide/C/index.html Using it, within *literally* minutes i figured out how to effectively use one of the package managers (Adept, a Qt front end for apt) and install my XVid/mp3/multimedia stuff. With Suse you've got to search for ages, then go find the software, install it, and hope it works. The typical case is: a) figure out that it doesn't work, b) google a bit, c) go ask on a mailing list (like this one), d) get a terse answer with the word "packman" in it, e) go add the sources to yast, f) install, waiting on yast to try to figure out if it can use the remote install source, g) try again. Ad nauseum. <short aside> A recent post to this list claimed that Yast downloaded the 17MB remote package list *3 times* in the *same session*. On a 6+MBit DSL line that might be acceptable (depends on whether the package server can keep up with your line - not all of them can provide more than 100k/second), but over a modem it's downright unacceptable. And what do you know - i haven't had to subscribe to a Kubuntu mailing list to figure anything out (nor have i had to google a single time). The kubuntu manual is simple, straightforward, and gives me the *exact* commands/packages i need to install to solve my problems (e.g., the much-maligned multimedia packages). It's as simple as "apt-get install ..." Granted, a fast DSL line still helps, but even without one the process is faster than with Suse because the apt tools don't have the high logistical overhead which Yast software management tools do. That leads us to... - Yast's software management is simple to use and effective but *incredibly* slow compared to apt-based tools. Orders of magnitude slower. The most annoying thing is that after any given install, Yast has to run the SuseConfig.* scripts, updating every single setting for every single app/service on my system, including those which have *absolutely nothing* to do with what i just installed. e.g. if i install a game, the Latex and Apache SuseConfig scripts are run. WTF?!?!?! With Adept (or other apt-based tools), it's trivial to search for new packages and installing them is FAST. There are no absurd wait times or "this repo is not signed. Do you want to continue?" warnings on every frigging install. (And that misleading "do not show this warning again" checkbox which doesn't really do what nearly everyone thinks it should.) Today i had to find out the hard way which development tools i needed to install on Kubuntu. This is a process consisting of: a) Try to configure/build one of my source trees. b) See what breaks (i.e., what tool/library is missing). c) Install the missing package. d) Lather, rinse, repeat. [For the non-Americans in the crowd, that means "start from the beginning," or "go back to step (a)".] In yast this is downright tedious to do because the install process takes so damned long. With apt/Adept it was almost a pleasure, with almost no wait time involved. Searching is simple and installation is lightening-fast. Now i've known about apt for years, and have used it in small amounts before, but i always found it tedious because it was missing a front end. With Kubuntu's clear, straightforward documentation, i was led directly to Adept and was downloading updates from faraway servers in a matter of under three minutes. And the Adept UI is a dream to use compared to Yast's software manager (which isn't bad in and of itself, but could learn some ease-of-use tricks from Adept). ------------------------------------------------ And finally... my [very personal] conclusion: i'm convinced. After 8 full years of being a die-hard Suse user, my laptop is going to stick with Kubuntu. My desktop PC will stay Suse, if ONLY because i've used Yast to set up the PC as my primary DSL connection and a router/firewall for the two laptops. If that was as easy to do in Kubuntu as it is in Suse, i'd have reinstalled my desktop machine today. i'm *that* convinced that Kubuntu is what i'm looking for in a desktop OS. For a server, i'd almost certainly stick with Yast because administering the network services is so simple to do. (And all these years i've thought that Suse is stronger as a desktop than a server.) <final gripe> And Kubuntu supports my GigaBit NIC out of the box, which Suse doesn't. To get it working under Suse i had to a) google until i found a forum talking about the driver, b) go download the driver sources from RealTek, c) hack its sources because it had typos which prevented it from compiling, d) install it. And repeat (d) every time i upgraded my kernel (which, granted, wasn't so often because the 10.1 update tools are so hosed). Fine - not every distro can get every driver included. But i can't even get this driver through online updates with Suse, whereas Kubuntu "just has it", even though they're using an older kernel than Suse 10.1 does. This is the longest mail i've written in some time. i hope that anyone replying to it will have the decency to liberally SNIP out large parts before posting back to the list ;). And, just as importantly, i hope it hasn't upset anyone or offended anyone's sense of decency or propriety. Suse is still good. But Kubuntu is also good. :) -- ----- stephan@s11n.net http://s11n.net "...pleasure is a grace and is not obedient to the commands of the will." -- Alan W. Watts