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An Early Taste of OpenSUSE
Anonymous Coward writes "Finally the site OpenSUSE.org is up and includes some beta downloads. The stable version can be expected around September 2005. Looks like there are some differences between Novell's SUSE and Redhat's Fedora mentioned in the FAQ."
There was quite a lot of buzz around the Novell booth today regarding OpenSuSE in San Fran at Linux World. I am not a Novell employee, but as my booth is right across from theirs, the interest from the public was obvious...then again it could have been the pea-green free hats!
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
YaST is the absolutely worst part of SuSE, but Novell is lauding it as one of their key features? YaST gets just about everything wrong: handling chroot cages with symlinks *OUT* of the chroot cage instead of *INTO* the chroot cage, an insistence on wrapping vendor software packages in badly written install scripts that are wildly inconsistent with the underlying RPM package management, the world's most complex and least organized auto-install system, and overfriendly GUI's that refuse to let you manage more than two kernels on one machine and overwrite your hand-edits? And that YaST package management and update system that doesn't have the concept of handling both an update and base OS package site, or allow unattended operation for cron scripts or kickstart installs? Novell should take the money they overpay the YaST team and give it to the author of fou4s, which actually works, and the http://packman.links2linux.de/ website which actually keeps packages like Mplayer up-to-date and compiled with all the options, instead of forcing you to recompile packages to actually contain all the available features built into the SRPM. And especially they should take the money away from their kernel team, who couldn't publish a working SRPM if their lives depended on it because they have this custom "build system" that actually prevents the SRPM's from being compilable without hand-editing.
They also pretend that their freely downladable versions of things are the same as their commercially published ones. Roughly half the packages are different: if you use the commercial installations, you cannot use the free mirror sites for package installations due to the YaST stupidities I mentioned and their inconsistent release numbers. This is why even if you buy SuSE licenses, you should always install from the free download sites, to keep good access to updates and consistent OS numbering with them.
It's sexy, it's stable, and has an emphasis on the desktop. I've used SuSE in one way, shape, or form since about 8.0. It's always been a reliable, well-put-together (although somewhat too 'commercialy' for me at times) system. Early provider of AMD64 support didn't hurt either. It's one linux distro that I never had an issue paying for, as they didn't go the "screw the users on pricing" or the "we're focusing on the server" attitudes that Red Hat did.
I use it in some instances as a lamp server, used to on the desktop(with great results), and have never been underwhelmed by it's stability and completeness.
If it weren't for OS X, I'd probably still be using it as my primary desktop. Bottom line is, use the right tool for the right job. Each system, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, GNU/Debian, NetBSD, Solaris, IRIX(gah!) each have their own place in the mix.
The older I get, the less I like everyone else.
I've been a long time Redhat user starting with Redhat 6.0 all the way to Fedora Core 4. I was having a lot of problem with FC4 on my particular x86_64 machine so I went out to purchase the SuSe 9.3 Professional DVD and installed on another machine. What I found is that the default installation of SuSe is very good because it has a good balance of open/closed software that makes it very easy to use Linux as the primary work machine. After I got the hang of YaST I started to really like using it. It is more encompassing than Yum and seems like a very good balance for people who know how thing work but don't feel like always spending time treaking things.
Over all, I give high mark for SuSe for the engineering.
Of course there are still some problems with SuSe but so far I like it more than the current version of Fedora.
Maybe Linux will evolve into the 21st century with Novell and SUSE.
My ideal Linux distro:
My next computer will be a Mactel.