SuSE

On Saturday, I installed SusSE 9.3 (Linux), replacing Gentoo (which I installed in February). It look the entire evening, so, at this point, I can only really comment on the installation. Once I have a chance to play around with it a bit, I'll provide some more observations.

The installation is graphical and fairly intuitive, a nice change from Gentoo. However, tweaking things seemed harder than with Red Hat/Fedora and, unlike, most of the times I've installed Red Hat or Fedora, I had lots of annoying problems.

The installation is five CDs, so you have a zillion packages (programs) to choose to install (or not). Being a geek, I went through most of the lists looking for things that I would use. (The "base" installation is for a "regular" user's desktop (does anyone use Linux for that?), so things like gcc, etc. were not automatically selected). Along the way, I noticed various pacakges for xemacs. That got me thinking that I hadn't seem vim listed anywhere. So I went through every single category (KDE, Gnome, Apache, Development Tools, Games, etc.) looking for either vi, vim, or gvim to no avail. After the installation was done, I checked and there is vi and vim. (I have no no idea how they were described in the package list if they weren't under listed under the letter V). But, gvim was not installed. Five CDs and SuSE couldn't managed to included gvim. That seems like a major oversight. (And if it was on one of those CDs, then there packaged descriptions and categories are really bad as it was under neither 'G' nor 'V').

Probably the worse thing about the install was that it hung half way through one of the CDs. Clicking "Help" would toggle the contents of one the text panels and Alt+F5 would trigger a screensaver, but nothing else would trigger any response from the system. (And after waiting nearly an hour - I was cooking/eating dinner at the time - I don't think it was just slow). As a back-handed complement, I guess I can say that I was impressed that after rebooting, the installation was smart enough to resume at the start of that CD rather than kicking me back to square one (or, worse, trashing the system).

Compared to Red Hat/Fedora, SuSE was also less skilled at automatically configuring my hardware. One of the two network cards required me to click through a few dialogs (and select the defaults it provided) to configured it. (So why did it saw it couldn't configured it, if all the defaults it gave were right?!). Futhermore, I am very skeptical that it configured my sound card properly. It picked the wrong driver and rejected the right drivers. Moreover, the installation program didn't have an option to let you try out the configuration before accepting it. (Every version of Red Hat/Fedora that I've used got the sound card right and only Red Hat 7 had trouble with the network cards).

One of nice features of the installation program was it's ability to connect the Internet and magically figure out what packaged had updates and then install them. (It would have been better to do this before reading all the CDs, but that is probably asking too much). Red Hat seemed to do updates okay (but not at part of the installation), and Fedora somehow managed to regress several steps backwards with its ability to update packages. (Fedora was at best Beta-quality, and perhaps Alpha-quality in some areas, so it horrible-ness at updating packages prevented you from fixing these various bugs and annoyed you even more. Hence, I gave up on Fedora).

I almost forgot to gripe about CD #3. At the start there was some dialog about checking the media (i.e. CDs), but after I clicked on Accept, it seemed to keep going and didn't verify any of the CDs before commencing with the installation. (So either the interface was really poor, the installation has a bug, or I'm really dumb). Sure enough, Murphy's Law struck and the third CD was bad. (Windows thought it was okay, but the SuSE installation rejected it multiple times). So I had to re-burn a copy of the CD. (Between the hung installation and the bad CD, at least an hour was wasted).