After some Grief with the Suse 10.1 packaging tools, i bit the bullet and installed Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org) on my laptop.
I've done the same over the last couple of days.... mainly because the childish and petty "people" on this list were annoying me to the point I was ready to drop SUSE and never look back... but that's another story... and not somethign I want to get into.
What Suse does RIGHT:
SUSE does a lot of things right and it really starts to show once you load in a different distro. This really became apparent for me when I installed Kubuntu with the serious intent of switching over to it. Initially, I booted it up and the LiveCD version was working great... for a LiveCD. I think Knoppix is better as a LiveCD, btu the Kubuntu disk is good too. Then I installed. The install worked, and I had a "working" system, but... the installer did NOT identify my CPU properly. I got the default i386 kernel instead of an SMP kernel... and no word on 32 or 64 bit kernels... so... no CPU detecting going on at all. SUSE does this right every time. I had to install Synaptic seperately - Adept was installed... but not as easy to use as Synaptic. I enabled Multiverse... and was able to install some apps (including the correct kernel for my computer)... but even though there is almost 20,000 apps available, some of what I consider the "most basic" 3rd party apps are not there - as they are with SUSE and the 3rd party app maintainers (namely Guru and Packman) I tried installing Easyubuntu... and the "easy install from the website involved an SVN checkout... and the instructions (on the Easyubuntu website) were completely wrong. I have yet to get it working. i wonder where a new user would be? In the end I do have a fully functioning KDE... sort of. I bring up the KDE "Control Panel" and instead I get the Gnome one - despite downloading and installing ONLY Kubuntu. My monitor is not set up correctly - and the tools provided by Ubuntu to adjust the xorg settings are so primitive as to be useless (I "can" edit the xorg.conf file, but the Ubuntu guys have modified the layout to something do unrecognisable that I've yet to convince it to accept my montior settings). SAX2 wins out big time on this.
Using it, within *literally* minutes i figured out how to effectively use one of the package managers (Adept, a Qt front end for apt)
Have to agree here. This is where SUSE really fails the end user. An experienced person can work out what needs to be done, but a new users is not going to work it out... unless he /she has a LOT of hand holding. Where Ubuntu gets it right is the simplicity. The package manage is already there... it's PRECONFIGURED with the correct online repositories and... 3rd party repository settings are there... disabled by default, but already there. When you enable them, you are clearly informed that they are 3rd party repositories and unsupported etc. SUSE on the other hand comes with YAST... which works great if you want to install stuff off the DVD, but without a lot of background understanding... is a big blob of mystery to a new user when they want to add other repositories - and the SUSE Wiki is totally useless on this subject... there's info there, but it's so cryptic that it may as well be a recipie for beef stroganoff.
- Yast's software management is simple to use and effective but *incredibly* slow compared to apt-based tools. Orders of magnitude
You don't notice this until you install something in (K)Ubuntu. There... the install happes so quickly, I was left wondering... did it install something? Compare that to SUSE where even on a dual CPU computer, it takes forever. For me... the annoyance created by the childish idiots who think they are list police was almost enough to drive me away from SUSE... it's what got me looking elsewhere. But in the end, I was reminded that despite it all, SUSE is top of the heap when it comes to Linux. I will have to just filter out on a LOT of names to clear out the idiots from my inbox. If we/Novell can get the zmd/rug foolishness sorted out and find some satisfactory solution to the 3rd party apps thing, SUSE will win every time. C.