jdong
February 23rd, 2005, 02:58 AM
Yep, watch out: Distro junkie attack again!
Recently, to play with it some more, I've installed SuSE on my laptop (Celeron 340, 768MB RAM, i865 integrated graphics).
I'm not going to review SuSE -- I personally feel reviews are worth CRAP to people wanting to try distros. Why? It provides ONE person's opinion/experience on a distro, and further uses that ONE opinion to generalize about EVERYONE's experience with the product. Obviously far too few people have statistical background. (p.s., kudos to those reviewers who try and detail installations on 5 or 10 different systems -- You can ignore this last paragraph -- I, and most reviewers I've read, do not have the time/resources/time/time/time to do this!)
Well, basic experience:
1. Very nice install -- tells you in an overview EXACTLY EVERYTHING it's gonna do ahead of time, instead of making you work step-by-step, realizing that you made a mistake too late to correct it!
2. reiserfs is default. Has been that way since like 6.4. SuSE's reiserfs seems VERY matured -- I've done quite a number of hard resets (EVIL) but haven't been able to corrupt the FS yet. I'm impressed. P.S., Reiser4 is also built into the kernel (modprobe reiser4 ;-) ). I've yet to test it. Right now, I value my stability.
3. KDE -- GO KDE!! Still my favorite DE, primarily because of the kioslaves implementation. (Can Nautilus let me use ssh:/// to edit a textfile with Openoffice.org, then save it back? Err, not really.)... SuSE has definitely modified their KDE quite a bit. Switch User is enabled by default, pretty cool theme (can't complain yet), and nice set of applets in tray. They definitely changed the icon size proportions from default KDE Plastik, because I find myself clicking on wrong buttons much less often.
4. Power Management. Go find yourself some screenshots of YAST Powersave. Very nicely integrated -- grabs its events from acpid, but forwards it to the little tray applet. Events on lid close, sleep button, powerbutton, etc, can be controlled through the GUI. Suspend-to-disk works out-of-the-box. Suspendto RAM doesn't work -- hasn't worked on any other distro, either (black screen on resume).
5. Openoffice.org KDE integration -- much nicer than GTK+ OO.o... Again, Kioslaves rules -- being able to type in an http:// address into the Open dialog in Openoffice, saving to samba shares on-the-fly. P.S. Hoary is missing OOo KDE integration altogether... That ticks me off!
6. APT -- Get apt4rpm. It unlocks the entire SuSE archive -- RPMs for everything from FreeNX to wine, all quite up-to-date. (K3b 0.11.20cvs, Wine 20050211, KDE 3.2.3, X.org 6.8.2 late RC, Firefox 1.0 + IDN spoof fix, ...). Don't use YOU, use APT.
7. Init scripts -- nicely polished -- Initrd intelligently waits (idle-loops) for the root device to appear, allowing installation to USB hard drives that love to register 5 seconds too late! Network scripts background DHCP, but if another init script requires network access and mandatory devices aren't activated yet, it will pause for 15 seconds for DHCP to finish. The Hotplug scripts shows nice progress in *'s of what it's doing. Bootup is quite fast and comparable to Hoary -- unheard of in an RPM distro! Definitely we should hack some of these neat tricks to work with Hoary.
8. Yast -- very mature administration tool. Administers everything including the kitchen sync (j/k).
9. FAUmachine -- a GUI, vmware clone that uses a modified implementation of UML. It makes setting up virtual Linux machines as easy as apt-get install FAUMachine.
10. Kernel -- Diffed it against 2.6.8 -- about 10MB's worth of TEXT PATCHES! Goes into the HEAVILY PATCHED category, but definitely doesn't feel "weighed down" at all. Binary NVidia/ATI drivers are also prepackaged, but need to be fetched through YAST -- not too much different from Ubuntu.
This definitely seem like a great OS for me to settle on. I can tell you, the discovery of apt4rpm in SuSE made all the difference -- they provide stable "backports" of latest software (GAIM is at 1.1.3, just to say!) through APT, but not through YAST.
FAUmachine is also a big player. For the backports work (textmode compiling on an Athlon64), I can take the performance hit -- just give me a fickin virtual environment without 6 hours of manual reading and kernel patching!
I definitely want to switch my desktop over to SuSE.
Recently, to play with it some more, I've installed SuSE on my laptop (Celeron 340, 768MB RAM, i865 integrated graphics).
I'm not going to review SuSE -- I personally feel reviews are worth CRAP to people wanting to try distros. Why? It provides ONE person's opinion/experience on a distro, and further uses that ONE opinion to generalize about EVERYONE's experience with the product. Obviously far too few people have statistical background. (p.s., kudos to those reviewers who try and detail installations on 5 or 10 different systems -- You can ignore this last paragraph -- I, and most reviewers I've read, do not have the time/resources/time/time/time to do this!)
Well, basic experience:
1. Very nice install -- tells you in an overview EXACTLY EVERYTHING it's gonna do ahead of time, instead of making you work step-by-step, realizing that you made a mistake too late to correct it!
2. reiserfs is default. Has been that way since like 6.4. SuSE's reiserfs seems VERY matured -- I've done quite a number of hard resets (EVIL) but haven't been able to corrupt the FS yet. I'm impressed. P.S., Reiser4 is also built into the kernel (modprobe reiser4 ;-) ). I've yet to test it. Right now, I value my stability.
3. KDE -- GO KDE!! Still my favorite DE, primarily because of the kioslaves implementation. (Can Nautilus let me use ssh:/// to edit a textfile with Openoffice.org, then save it back? Err, not really.)... SuSE has definitely modified their KDE quite a bit. Switch User is enabled by default, pretty cool theme (can't complain yet), and nice set of applets in tray. They definitely changed the icon size proportions from default KDE Plastik, because I find myself clicking on wrong buttons much less often.
4. Power Management. Go find yourself some screenshots of YAST Powersave. Very nicely integrated -- grabs its events from acpid, but forwards it to the little tray applet. Events on lid close, sleep button, powerbutton, etc, can be controlled through the GUI. Suspend-to-disk works out-of-the-box. Suspendto RAM doesn't work -- hasn't worked on any other distro, either (black screen on resume).
5. Openoffice.org KDE integration -- much nicer than GTK+ OO.o... Again, Kioslaves rules -- being able to type in an http:// address into the Open dialog in Openoffice, saving to samba shares on-the-fly. P.S. Hoary is missing OOo KDE integration altogether... That ticks me off!
6. APT -- Get apt4rpm. It unlocks the entire SuSE archive -- RPMs for everything from FreeNX to wine, all quite up-to-date. (K3b 0.11.20cvs, Wine 20050211, KDE 3.2.3, X.org 6.8.2 late RC, Firefox 1.0 + IDN spoof fix, ...). Don't use YOU, use APT.
7. Init scripts -- nicely polished -- Initrd intelligently waits (idle-loops) for the root device to appear, allowing installation to USB hard drives that love to register 5 seconds too late! Network scripts background DHCP, but if another init script requires network access and mandatory devices aren't activated yet, it will pause for 15 seconds for DHCP to finish. The Hotplug scripts shows nice progress in *'s of what it's doing. Bootup is quite fast and comparable to Hoary -- unheard of in an RPM distro! Definitely we should hack some of these neat tricks to work with Hoary.
8. Yast -- very mature administration tool. Administers everything including the kitchen sync (j/k).
9. FAUmachine -- a GUI, vmware clone that uses a modified implementation of UML. It makes setting up virtual Linux machines as easy as apt-get install FAUMachine.
10. Kernel -- Diffed it against 2.6.8 -- about 10MB's worth of TEXT PATCHES! Goes into the HEAVILY PATCHED category, but definitely doesn't feel "weighed down" at all. Binary NVidia/ATI drivers are also prepackaged, but need to be fetched through YAST -- not too much different from Ubuntu.
This definitely seem like a great OS for me to settle on. I can tell you, the discovery of apt4rpm in SuSE made all the difference -- they provide stable "backports" of latest software (GAIM is at 1.1.3, just to say!) through APT, but not through YAST.
FAUmachine is also a big player. For the backports work (textmode compiling on an Athlon64), I can take the performance hit -- just give me a fickin virtual environment without 6 hours of manual reading and kernel patching!
I definitely want to switch my desktop over to SuSE.