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SuSE 8.0 Now Shipping
MobyTurbo writes "Well, it's technically a day late, but SuSE Linux 8.0 is now shipping. The increase from 7.3 to 8.0 is due to the inclusion of KDE 3.0, a SuSE-modified kernel version 2.4.18 (with Andre's VM), an improved firewall, among other packages that have been upgraded or added. (Including a couple of new games. :-) )"
Yast, the SuSE installation program is not free, and does not comply to the Open Source definition. Remember that when choosing between SuSE and other distros.
"Stable" has a rather fluid definition when applied to the 2.4 series. If you want real
stability stick to 2.2 , forget about 2.4 (its a lemon IMO) and wait for 2.6 to arrive.
There were lots of good reasons to use SuSE until version 7.3. But this is not true anymore with version 8.0: they have removed support for the original YaST installation tool.
As a result, the users are now forced to use YaST 2, which depends on Qt. So far, I have managed to install all my PCs without the Qt libraries (this is a personal choice because I prefer GTK+, not something that I recommend) using the original YaST. In the 7.x versions, YaST was issuing some warnings saying that Qt was a necessary component and that it should be installed anyway, but I could safely ignore this warning and get a fully working system without it. It looks like this is not possible anymore with SuSE 8.0.
I have used every single release of SuSE Linux since version 4.3 several years ago, and I praised them for their excellent installation and internationalization. But now it looks like I will have to select another distribution if I do not find a way to bypass YaST 2. :-(
Moderators note: this is intended to be a public complaint, not a flame. But if you think that it should be moderated as Flamebait because you disaprove my choice of toolkits, then feel free to do it.
-Raphaël
Perhaps because QT is ass-slow and RAM-hungry compared to gtk, wasn't free for a long time, and is a freaking bloated single library (unlike gtk...if I want just glib, I just use glib...no reimplementation of the STL here).
SuSE doesn't have anything particularly wrong with them (aside from being the only distro I know of not to actually allow downloading ISOs, and having a lower degree of compatibility with most third party packaged software from their lower market share), so as long as they stay in business, I could see people that started out with them sticking with them through inertia. SuSE isn't my favorite distro, but it isn't "bad". Qt is "bad".
The whole neat thing about Linux is that you aren't constrained to use a distro as a black box in the way it was packaged -- season to taste. I think it's quite rational to want to remove Qt from SuSE.
May we never see th