First Looks at Suse 8.0 / KDE 3.0

The Register has a first look article on Suse 8.0 and KDE 3.0. Short story: they liked both, pretty much. I think the section on installation -- notably its length -- speaks volumes about the 'which is easier, Linux or MS' debate, too." There's also a review of the new SuSE up at Newsforge with some more details.

Comments

Suse 8.0 is Very nice!

[garglblaster]

I've been running this on both a subnotebook and a desktop computer and I must say I'm very pleased with it. Especially KDE3.0 makes a difference. (KDE 2 never appealed to me) In addition it was a very pleasant experience to do the installs via NFS from a central machine with the CDROM drive - it went flawlessly.

Actually I'm definitely thinking about upgrading a few of my Redhat based systems as well..

Re:Suse 8.0 is Very nice!

[Phexro]

"RPM-based (in fact, all binary-based) distros should go the way of the dodo bird."

It seems like more and more people are latching on to the source-based OS these days. It appears to have become the Slackware of the new millennium. That is to say, the Real Men use source-based distros, and anyone who uses a binary distro is a stupid uneducated newbie sod who couldn't figure out how to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.

Well, here in the real world, there are people who want to install software without waiting for everything to compile. In fact, the reason I stopped using Slackware was because it took too long to compile, install, and configure all the software it didn't come with.

While your systems is laboring to compile XFree86, I'll be using mine, with software from binary packages.

Re:How many Cd's?

[ringbarer]

SuSE were the first company to offer a DVD distribution. There was a lot of fuss back then because no-one believed Linux could play DVDs.

Re:Instalation...

[Sancho]

Are you kidding? When was the last time you installed Windows?
XP virtually installs itself. You barely have to be there.
Win2k is similar, but does have more required user input. Regardless, there are virtually no choices required in either of these two, unlike Linux where you have thousands of software packages to choose from.

That said, under Linux, you have thousands of software packages to choose from. In Windows, you get a few "applications" like a calculator and notepad.

info has to be installed separately?

[corebreech]

Long time SuSE user here, who in the past always went with the "install everything" option.

With 8.0, there was no "install everything" option -- or I missed it -- so I picked "Default KDE w/ Office".

You'd expect that info would be installed with such an option, yes?

The reason I needed info was because SuSE is still using lilo, and I'm sorry, but grub simply rules, alpha or not, so I had to do that bit manually.

Also, I have a GeForce4 TI 4600 and I can't for the life of me get the thing to work right (yes I have the latest nVidia drivers), but I attribute that to it being a new card and all and fully expect somebody else to figure it out for me. Not a big deal since I stay in text mode most of the time anyways (use the GeForce for Windows games.)

Oh, yes, and one last thing... NO STICKERS!!! SuSE always has an assortment of somewhat-silly-but-nevertheless-cool stickers I can put on things and regret having done so later, but none were to be found in 8.0.

So sad it makes me.

Downsides

[PapaZit]

SuSE isn't bad, but I've found the following problems so far:

SuSE 8.0 is missing the gtk-config script. For that matter, I'm pretty sure (can't check now) that there's no gtk-devel. Yes, the gtk lib is there, but if you have any apps that you need to build, it's a little bit annoying.

The online updater is screwy. When I first tried, I got the "bad GPG sig" message talked about in the article. When I tried again, it wouldn't even try to download the updates. A detailed problem report (submitted via YaST2, nice) has not been answered in close to a week.

It looks like KDE 3 assumes that root can write to a user's home directory. I use NFS at home (and map root to nobody). KDE 3 doesn't like that at all. We use AFS at work. KDE 3 doesn't like that any better. Not SuSE's fault (same problems with RH 7.3 and with KDE 3 compiled myself).

On my laptop, YaST2 won't recognize my Xircom modem/ethernet card or my Lucent 802.11b card. The modules aren't even listed in their setup program. Tricky business, I know, but Red Hat handles it.