Review of SuSE 8.1 Professional

Gentu writes "SuSE 8.1 is out and it seems to be the main competitor of Red Hat 8. OSNews has the review of its Professional version. The new SuSE 8.1 seems to be sleekier and more powerful than ever." Eugenia, as usual, isn't shy about saying what she doesn't like. There's a review on Linuxlookup.com as well.

Comments

Competition

[Jacer]

It's odd that RH, SuSe and Mandrake compete with each other more than their common enemy.

Re:Competition

[albat0r]

I think it's great that they compete each other. That way we will have better Linux distro for us, and better Linux distro to compete "their common enemy". That's why competition is good you know!

Re:Competition

[pavon]

No, I am actually advocating exactly the opposite.

I have an operating system. It is made of of thousands of packages, each of which have a handlefull of alternatives. Now look at the newer distro's comming out such as Lindow's, Midori, or even OS X. They all target different markets and thus design their systems differently.They use different combinations of components to best fit their goal, and compete among each other within their respective target markets. A more mature version of this sort of thing can be seen in other products, such as electronics or cars.

Now each of these companies start out with a stock linux (or BSD or whatever) system but change it, as they have the money and time, to improve it for their market. This is demonstrated by the fact that the longer that linux has been around, the more distro's that have popped up and the more varied some of them have become.

Furthermore, you put many competing products in the market place, and standards suddenly become benificial to the companies, while they are detrimental to the monopolys. Thus look at the computer hardware market where each field began with proprietary products, but standards where soon formed for the second or third generation of the product.

I don't want to see one operating system (but if we are going to have a monopoly then yes I'd rather have an open one) But I guess you can call me 'fanatical' about an idea: The well founded idea that standards and a certain level of openness is greatly benificial to capitalistic markets, resulting in better products, lower prices and a healthier economy.

To me, this is exciting: a real thriving computer software industry as apposed to this stagnant sespool that is Microsoft.

linux installs

[LinuxWoman]

To be honest, many of the recent "improved" install tools require the user to think exactly like the programmers did in order to use the installer properly. Otherwise, most of them require a bit of unnecessary trial and effort to get your install right.

Knowing that the new install tool is tricky, I'll still stick with SuSE. It's stable and intuitive without the use my way and like it that redhat tends towards or the I work great if I decide to work of mandrake.

If linux ever intends to become a mainstream (read: NON GEEK) OS, it needs to become dependable, easy to use and easy to install. For example, why did it take me almost 3 days to hack my way to using my qwest dsl connection without having to boot into windows? DSL is a standard technology now, you should be able to use it easily.

And don't forget. . .

[kfg]

it should fit on a single floppy.

Look, you can have the slim and sexy Swiss Army knife. . .*or* you can have the one with all the doodads. What's more, to get all the doodads you want you might even have to have *two* of big mothers, each for a special range of abilities.

That's just the way it is. I canna change the laws of physics Cap'n.

KFG

Mostly irrelevant...

[ivanandre]

I think this Eugenia distros instalations chat irrelevant.

The OSes have more important aspects than installations. Anyway, the OS is installed ONE time, but used MANY times...

Why in hell she rates an OS by its installations process?

SuSE migrated me.

[Qbertino]

Let's face it, friends:
Distros save you cooking the cuisine but therefore give you fastfood. You can't have both. And SuSE is the best darn distro I've ever seen - making the best job of offering a fastfood cuisine compromise.
It's that simple.
For instance: the documentation simply 0wnz RedHat and all the rest - and a dead tree is something good to hold on to when your box won't budge and you haven't been told the "man 'your one-word question here'" trick yet.
SuSEs YaST got me so far with me knowing nothin' 'bout Linux, I would have found it silly to give up again.
Shure this automatic stuff tends to be a pain a year later when your "/usr/lib/java ->jsdk1.4.1" gets changed to "/usr/lib/java ->jsdk1.1.2" every time you fire it up once again, but when you are ready to notice the fault in some distros config I guess you're ready for Debian.

I'm not buying SuSE anymore, as I am not buying any Distro anymore. I'm expierenced enough to get Gentoo or Debian rolling from scratch and if anything it's them getting a donation.

But for n00bs like I was one once, I know no better way to turn to Linux and *never* look back on Windows again than SuSE. This company has earned itself a solid reputation for a reference grade quality Linux distribution and every word of it is true. If you're thinking of giving Linux a try, try SuSE.
I can only recommend it.

Re:RPMS for SuSE 8.1

[addaon]

As other's have mentioned, they'll be downloadable shortly. But do remember, the RPM's are not GPL'd. The programs are GPL'd. That does not mean that you have any right to them, although, as I said, SuSE does make them available. It means that, should they be available, the source would also be available. I appreciate that SuSE, and most other distributions, are openly distributed. But it is also important to keep in mind that this is not a consequence of the GPL.

Re:Does that mean she likes it, or not?

[tomhudson]

It means she doesn't really know what she's talking about. After all

1. most of these packages are from third parties. It's not up to the distro people to fix them
2. Sun won't lilke you modifying Star Office (so download openoffice and bitch about the stuff that was left out THERE because of patents, etc).
3. "GTK+ applicaton to look more as the primary Qt platform" - WTF. Nobody home there - GTK - The Gimp Toolkit - Gnome vs. Qt - Trolltech
4. "Better integration with Windows" - Why? If you want Windows, run Wndows. If you need to share files, use Samba.

Unfortunately, this has been the trend with too many reviewers - they look at the superficial stuff, and make up their minds based on whether the colors are pretty, and this passes as in-depth journalism.

It was thinking (if you can call it that) like this that gave us the dot.bomb crash.

go ahead, mod this as flamebait, but I think the original article was a real POS, and that reviewers should be required to actually USE the product in a production environment for more than a few days before writing about it.

Re:RPMS for SuSE 8.1

[Turmio]

Even if SuSE packaged GPL'ed software, they don't have to make rpms publically available. GPL says you have to give source to anyone you distribute binaries of GPL'ed programs. Therefore it's perfectly ok for SuSE or anyone only to sell rpms on CD to customers as long as you give a CD with source rpms too. Or give an account to a private FTP containing the source. You only have to give everything to those who get binaries by some mean. Then of course if you buy SuSE cd's, you can redistribute images of CD's without caring SuSE's feelings at all. But you don't have to. But back to the point, your conclusion was that rpms of GPL'ed software means they HAVE TO BE downloadable somewhere. Well, it just is not necessarily true.