A Closer Look at SUSE 10

SilentBob4 writes to tell us that MadPenguin is running a review of the recently released SUSE 10.0. From the review: "Novell has made some interesting changes in distribution and development since our last review of SUSE Linux. Many say it's for the better and I'd say I'm inclined to go with that theory. To tell you the truth, I never thought I'd see the day SUSE opened up it's doors to the community to help expand and concert development efforts, but here we are in a world where SUSE is open and still making geeks sweat every time a new release comes out"

Comments

vaseline-free please?

[quentin_quayle]

Linux is easy and can do everything Windows and Mac can, with some exceptions such as games - for people who like anti-aliasing. For those who can't stand the fuzzy fonts, Linux is far from usable.

On Windows, if you like clear fonts, you just find the little check-box for anti-aliasing, uncheck it, maybe reboot, and the interface is *beautiful*, *perfect*. Every letter is crisp with clean, sharp edges, and well-formed, well-hinted at any size.

On Linux, if you can't tolerate the blurry look, you're in for a long ordeal to even try to get readable fonts without anti-aliasing. Getting rid of the a-a, and getting decent hinting are *both* daunting tasks even for techies.

Most "newbie" tutorials are on trivial things like changing the background images or playing media files. You have to locate relatively obscure pages like this and this.

Then you have to find out how to first tweak, and then compile source packages on Linux. Then you have to somehow get the system to use the one set of fonts and version of X rather than the other.

I'm beyond expert status on Windows, yet I still haven't got fonts looking readable after hours of messing with Suse 10. For the non-technical user it's unrealistic to imagine they would ever figure it out, or even find someone to fix it for them.

Evidently most people like anti-aliasing. And that's fine for them. For the rest of us, Linux has a *huge* obstacle to usability.

Re:Hardware support

[justins]

I always find it unfair when Linux distros are labelled poor because they don't support somebody's hardware, like their wireless card not working. The Linux developers would happily develop drivers for software if they were given the hardware specs to do so, but that isn't the case and drivers must be created with little help from the manufacturer.

In many cases the manufacturer would happily develop drivers if they could make a closed-source Linux driver without the exercise turning into a total buttfuckathon.

Re:Hardware support

[Lucractius]

thats one of the fortunate things im looking forward to in freebsd. the manufactureres of wireless hardware are very happily supplying not only help but paying some people to be writing drivers for wireless hardware for FreeBSD 6.0...

Ill be mean and throw the grenade now. Its cause its BSD not GPL. They can benifit more from the BSD liscence than they can from the GPL. Dont flame me bout it im just pointing out an example. And im happy with it, it means that theres going to be open source drivers, and they can change them for their own purposes without hassles of releasing their changes. Think about what that means if your writing drivers for hardware... a windows driver derived from a gpl one would need to be redistributed as source wouldnt it, a BSD one wouldnt.

feel free to correct me if im wrong bout that.

on the side note this is one thing that will mean i never use Debian. bunch of GNU freaks they are, bitch slapping the OpenSolaris kernel and not supporting or even helping building a GNU userland for it purely because its licence. *grumbles*