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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.
You mean BSD?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
SuSE has an ftp installation... so if you don't want to buy the CD, you have to download their installation manager and boot to that. then you can select the packages you want, etc. via ftp.
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It's time to switch to Mandrake they are at the Linux 9.0 One entire playing level beter than RedHat, Slackware and all other Debian (has only Linux 3.0) !!!!
Well, ha... I'm running Windows 98, so I'm like 91 levels above Mandrake.
SO, uh, WINDOWS USERS CANT COUNT EITHER? THINK OF THE CHILDREN, DON'T USE MICROSOFT!
Yeah, and they did admit to version inflation, to keep up with redhat.
;), we would be on Slackware 47 by now. (it would actually be in the 20s somewhere if we'd gone 1, 2, 3...)
:)
;)
From their website
The following was posted to the Slackware.com Forum by Patrick Volkerding (Slackware Project Lead), at 21:43 10-10-1999.
I've stayed out of this for now, but I do think I should lend a little justification to the version number thing.
First off, I think I forgot to count some time ago. If I'd started on 6.0 and made every release a major version (I think that's how Linux releases are made these days, right?
I think it's clear that some other distributions inflated their version numbers for marketing purposes, and I've had to field (way too many times) the question "why isn't yours 6.x" or worse "when will you upgrade to Linux 6.0" which really drives home the effectiveness of this simple trick. With the move to glibc and nearly everyone else using 6.x now, it made sense to go to at least 6.0, just to make it clear to people who don't know anything about Linux that Slackware's libraries, compilers, and other stuff are not 3 major versions behind. I thought they'd all be using 7.0 by now, but no matter. We're at least "one better", right?
Sorry if I haven't been enough of a purist about this. I promise I won't inflate the version number again (unless everyone else does again
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
SuSE just doesn't have enough CDs. I want SuSE to install every utility for every OS I can, at least in theory, emulate. I also want all optional features enabled and support for every language and file format just in case. I'm talking something like a 20GB minimum install, and SuSE just isn't there yet. Maybe next release, though.
To be honest, many of the recent slashdot posts require the reader to think exactly like the writers did in order to understand the sentences properly. Otherwise, most of them require a bit of unnecessary reading and re-reading to get their meaning right.
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.
For example, why did it take me almost 3 tries to hack my way through the previous sentence? Complete punctuation and grammar are standard technologies now, you should be able to use them. Thanks!
Stupidity is mis-underestimated.
YaST2 and SaX2 can be better, but even as they are today blow most of Red Hat's preference panels away. On the other hand Red Hat's XFT font properties are no match to any other Linux distribution so far, while Red Hat has good integration for Qt and GTK+ toolkits, something that SuSE doesn't.
This is very important! People keep bitching about Anti-Aliased Font support, well why is RedHat the only including an advanced utility? Fonts are 99% of your visual aspect of your desktop, good looking fonts make a BIG difference. (side note, Mosfet Liquid engine/theme is a must..)
I'm a SuSE (sparc64), Mandrake (x86) user. Mostly because Mandrake had the better font support. I've switched over to RedHat 8.0 due to the XFT font support.
BTW, I shouldnt have to recompile the desktop to have decent font support. So dont keep saying "Compile yourself". If I wanted a source based, compile everything yourself distribution, I would use Gentoo. (Gentoo doesnt include all the custom applications for preferences.)
First she complains about the installer not making enough decisions, then she complains about SaX making decisions.
In reality, the installer DOES make all decisions. All it does (and that was obviously confusing Eugenia) is SHOW these decisions to you and allow you to change it. But it doesn't force you to do anything at all.
What's wrong with that? The below-average complete moron (which everybody seems to be targetting these days.) just presses "Install" and it installs without any need to configure anything. On a computer with one clean harddrive or partition, the install should work just fine with the default settings.
Hell, even Eugenia was able to install the damn thing, so it's dumbed down enough.
Also, unlike Eugenia sais, SuSE comes with CDs *AND* DVD, not "or".
That's not all. Here's a list of what else is missing:
I guess we'll have to wait for 8.2.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
I, for one, think you'd have to try pretty hard to find SuSE's installation difficult. She complains about the problems for newbies, but this is SuSE 8.1 Professional. Yes, it's for professionals.
Having said that, I think the installer is wonderful for newbies. I like the fact that you get a summary (which is like a web page, as Eugenia said), and you can drill down as deep as you want to customize it. If you like the defaults that the installer has chosen, you can click OK and go right to the installation. I can't imagine why a linear progression through a wizard would be preferable.
If you honestly have a hard time installing SuSE, then I just can't imagine what kind of installer you'd find easier. (I guess that's why I don't design installers.)
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
- most of these packages are from third parties. It's not up to the distro people to fix them
- 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).
- "GTK+ applicaton to look more as the primary Qt platform" - WTF. Nobody home there - GTK - The Gimp Toolkit - Gnome vs. Qt - Trolltech
- "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.
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.