Yast makes the Ubuntu installer look like a rock... and frankly... the Yast installer is more intuitive, better organized, better automated, and more reliable... so far in my experience.
This was a big deal breaker for me when I experimented with Kubuntu and Ubuntu late last year. The installer that Ubuntu uses is nice, but in the end the SUSE one wins no questions. For example there is a real nasty installer bug in 6.10 that pops up when you try to change the partitioning scheme on install (you know how the guessed partitioning scheme is never what you want). It looses track of the / partition, and won't let you install because it thinks you haven't assigned a root partition. The work around is to tinker in some file somewhere and remove the root partition check routine. Not nice at all for a new user.
And this is my personal favorite... after I loaded Ubuntu (forgetting to load gcc at install time) I went back and installed gcc from the install media...
I ran into the exact same problems with other apps... and with gcc in Ubuntu. Although it was a lot more pleasing to the eye and brain to use Synaptic (vs Smart) to find and install software, I often got broken stuff.. like the GCC thing. The organization of apache is another one that annoyed me. It is a no-brainer to setup a basic webserver in SUSE, and was a pain in Ubuntu. Also configuring my monitor and video drivers (nVidia) was 10 times more hassle than with SUSE.
There is more desktop/system integration in openSUSE.
This is a big one. SUSE is simply more "professional" and polished. Even Mr. Shuttleworth recently admitted one of the big things really missing in Ubuntu was a nice integrated system management tool (like YAST). This is not to say that Ubuntu is a bad distribution. It has some excellent qualities about it. It's a solid distribution, and if someone wants to try out Linux for the first time, I have no fear of suggesting they experiment with Ubuntu. If they want a professional installation though, SUSE wins hands down. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org