i don't know how yast2 performs with SuSE 8.0, but in 7.3 he is just like the name of his process: bignfat. On a 133Pentium with 96MB Ram and KDE2 running you simply can't work with YaST2. On startup of YaST2 it's really like in the old times, you can drink a cup of coffee while the programs comes up. On the other hand the P133 is not really state of the Art.
It's worse on the P90/48MB RAM I own. No, it's not up to current standards, but the machine is absolutely sufficient for its purposes. It's just the management and configuration tool that's a major pain in the *ss.
In my Opinion Yast2 is a great tool, but not for a old machine. I want also say that the SuSE-Distri is a great piece of work and i want thank all the SuSE-people for the great work.
And in my opinion, YaST2 is an interesting project, but it's much too resource-intensive to be called anything near a 'great tool'. I mean, look at the competition: Windows' Control Panel and other configuration panes. Those don't take half a minute to appear on a P2/266 w/ 128 MB RAM. And have you ever had xosview running when running YOU? First of all, it takes around *half an hour* to complete on some machines of mine (again P2/266 or P2/300 w/ 128 MB RAM) and it uses up almost the entire system memory *and* swap (128 MB, too). When YOU exits, memory usage drops from 128/128 to 94/24 or thereabouts, and the 94 are at least half comprised of cache. Note that this is all with a local mirror of the FTP site, so the download time comes into the equation with just above zero.. I can only repeat, YaST2 looks promising, but it's much too clunky to be a 'great tool' at the moment. I'm still sticking with SuSE, but I may switch to something else on that P90 (hey, I've still got a 486/66, that's waiting to be revived as soon as I get some memory that works in it). BTW, upgrading the machine is not an option, considering the price of EDO RAM modules. Cheers Tobias