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SuSE Linux 9.3 Professional Review at Mad Penguin

Posted by timothy on from the hey-it-does-come-with-mp3-playing-helix dept.

llywelynelysium writes "Mad Penguin has an excellent review of the upcoming SuSE 9.3 Professional release. The review is mostly positive, commenting on SUSE's improved speed, improved Gnome suppport, inclusion of Xen, and interestingly, the use of Firefox as the default browser. On the other hand, the review states that Novell has futher crippled the multimedia capabilities of their distribution by removing MP3 playback support. SUSE scores three stars in the end."

2 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. What about the jukebox programs? by Omni+Magnus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I would like to see either YAMMI or the jukebox plugins for XMMS included right out of the box.

  2. The review may be excellent... by IBeatUpNerds · · Score: 2, Interesting

    but the article sure sucks the big one.

    This one is good: Installation is probably the hardest thing to cover in a Linux review. I mean, what can you really say about it? It either did the trick or it didn't.

    First the guy says it's hard to cover. Then he goes on to compare it to one of two simple choices. Make up your mind, partner. Anyway, I'd rather not clutter up my rant with anything else on-topic.

    Let me disclose that Suse is the only Linux distro that I really can't stand. I gave it a fair shot (~5 months). My installation was from the 9.1 pro CDs I bought for __90__ USD. Wow. What a freaking rip off. Slow as Christmas. Hands down, the absolute slowest Linux distro I've ever used. It took 2 fucking minutes to start YOU.

    My favorite Suse bug was that every now and then, on my laptop, when I'd boot up, X would segfault. No decent reason why. strace didn't reveal fishy behavior. I upgraded to the latest Suse X package. No luck. Reboot a few times and it would suddenly work again. Never had any such problem outside of Suse.

    My second favorite problem was that the Suse guys apparently modified something in the i810 RNG driver such that it would occasionally cause an Oops in an IRQ. Very stable, indeed.

    I had other problems over the months, too. I always filed well written bugs with good information. Nothing ever came of it. I've put this machine through numerous versions of Slackware, Fedora, and Debian. Never, ever ,ever have I experienced any problems whatsoever outside of the 90 dollar copy of Suse. Fuck Suse. I hope Novell sells them and they go out of business.

    Two good things: other than the fact that you had to watch a movie while waiting for them to load, Suse's configuration tools are the most complete and full-featured of any Linux distro I've ever used.

    The two books that come with the Suse distro are pretty simplistic for an large-scale user, but they are very good for simple users. I referred to them a few times. Getting good printed docs with your OS always gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.