SuSE vs. Ubuntu

[darkenedday]

what isnt?

[mattisking]

I have very mixed reviews so far from my try-out of Suse 10.1. Personally, I don't care for Yast at all. I don't like how slow and cumbersome it is... I don't think it integrates into Gnome well at all, it's not always particularly stable, and it makes some things more difficult than they need to be.

I'm not happy with rug... that's funny because I so loved it along with Red Carpet once upon a time but now I'm just such a huge fan of apt and Synaptic. I find updating a bit... clumsy with very little information available. I also found the installer to be clunky, ugly, and incredibly slow. It pales in comparison to Ubuntu's "Live CD" installer... I really love that.

Otherwise, so far I gotta say I'm very, very impressed. XGL was extremely easy to enable (though it crashed once while enabling it the first time) without requiring me to edit anything. It knew that I'd need the proprietary ATI drivers and knew how to get them and set them up. It also did a masterful/fantastic job (so it seems) at tweaking my xorg.conf... wow. It even beautifully configured my Dell 2005FPW widescreen LCD. I mean... look at the attached file.

Ubuntu does seem to be ahead of the curve with up to date packages.. little things, like Banshee 0.10.9 instead of 0.10.10... and what appears to be a much older version of Evolution.. not sure on that point since I've been running Edgy for a while now. I haven't yet worked out where to find more "catalogs" for rug or whatever (it's been a long time) so some applications, like gthumb, aren't currently installable.

All in all, Suse 10.1 points out some glaring holes in Ubuntu Dapper AND Edgy, but that's not to say it's better. It's not. Take NetworkManager's support for VPN (and no, I didn't get it to work with my company's stupid SonicWall) and SaX2's work on my xorg.conf and stick it in Ubuntu... and shake in easy configuration for XGL or AIGLX enabling, and Ubuntu would soundly knock out SUSE for me. SUSE on the other hand, at least for me, would take a lot more time to write in this entry.

[hizaguchi]

I thought Suse was better than Ubuntu in every way... except that the package system absolutely sucks. And that is enough to kill it for me. I couldn't install alot of my favorite software without tracking down extra repositories, and the drivers for about half of my hardware were even missing.

Personally, I think they should just switch completely to apt (even apt for rpm). If they did that, and improved their package collection the way a huge company like Novell is capable of, they'd have the best desktop distro around.

[hizaguchi]

I'm using 64-bit Suse again this week, and despite the fact that I'm still very disappointed with the package management (when I installed, the YOU setup partially failed and I can't get it to work at all now), I'm liking the distro more and more overall. It's lacking in hardware detection, but with a little reading of the documentation and knowledge of my hardware I've been able to get a bunch off stuff working that I couldn't pull off with 64-bit Ubuntu. Fglrx was harder to install (I had to add a repository) but afterward Xgl/Compiz is completely effortless. The network applet is on par with OSX networking, in that it allows me to move between wireless networks completely automatically and it hasn't given me any problems at all yet. And best of all, the 64-bit SMP kernel allows my laptop to suspend to ram perfectly well and very quickly, which I couldn't do with ANY of Ubuntu's SMP kernels.

[deanjm1963]

Suse was my very first distro that I ever tried. I liked it a lot, but that was when I was doing things blind, searching for repos, not knowing what software to install to get dvd's going, codecs, etc, I was a real noob. What really put me off it was BPALOGIN, a simple cable client that's needed for BigPond (here in Australia). No matter how much I searched, posted on boards, etc, no one could tell me how to get it working, supposedly there was some script to incorporate it into suse's firewall, but for a new linux user (2 years ago), way above my head. My second choice was Mandriva, and finally Ubuntu... I'm glad I changed. Ubuntu might not have the latest and greatest in the current repositories, but I'd prefer stability over the newest and potentially bug-ridden any day.

[raffytaffy]

i used suse before i discovered ubuntu. suse had some issues with gnome relying to heavily on kde apps...that pissed me off. PLus suse had to many dependencies to resolve...to install...anytinng.Ill give suse 10.2 a try on a seperate partition..but for now im using ubuntu only

[baldy1324]

i am very open-minded to other distros than debian (which i use), (i love fedora,ubuntu,and freebsd) but suse-NO. suse 10.1 is the slowest operating system i have ever seen, it boots amazingly slowly. i cant figure howto upgrade packages in yast. is it online update, update packages... it takes about 30 seconds to start yast on my computer. its package manager and way of respositories is absolutely terrible. but it is very novell polished.

[andlinux21]

My very first distro was Mandrake, then Red Hat, and then SuSE 8.2 I liked SuSE the best back then and I kept using it till 9.3. I barely used my linux box it was mainly so I could shoutcast my music 24/7. Then I came across Hoary and I have been hooked ever since. I worked out the box on my old Dell Latitude Cpi and since then I have Breezy on a old Gateway Solo Notebook. I have basically been putting Ubuntu on every PC i can get my hands on. I wish they had a DVD so that people using dialup could still get some basic features out of the gate. But I am more than happy with Ubuntu it rocks!!!

[n8bounds]

My very first distro was Mandrake, then Red Hat, and then SuSE 8.2 I liked SuSE the best back then and I kept using it till 9.3. I barely used my linux box it was mainly so I could shoutcast my music 24/7. Then I came across Hoary and I have been hooked ever since. I worked out the box on my old Dell Latitude Cpi and since then I have Breezy on a old Gateway Solo Notebook. I have basically been putting Ubuntu on every PC i can get my hands on. I wish they had a DVD so that people using dialup could still get some basic features out of the gate. But I am more than happy with Ubuntu it rocks!!!

There are DVDs:

http://torrent.ubuntu.com/releases/d...release.1/dvd/

http://cargol.net/~ramon/ubuntu-dvd-en

[darkhatter]

after awhile you start to miss all the good suse stuff I just wish they didn't go gnome. If I wanted to type in commands I would go back to my slackware system, yast does take a while to start but thats ok, cause I can configure my whole system using that, its also got better hardware support. you can stop with the suse 10.1 they openly said there was a problem and have provided fixes openSuse 10.2 should go back to normal. I must be going now you can continue your suse and novell bashing