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

Excusee-my-SuSE

[syntap]

SuSE 9.3 was the distro that finally got me seriously considering cutting the Windows cord, and 10 handed me the scissors. It's such a great, complete distro that's easy to install and maintain, easy to customize. It's the most polished distro I have used. Between SuSE 10 and Ubuntu the reasons for sticking with Windows and its licensing/upgrading hell are slim. Yeah I'll still need Windows for some things (mostly PHB stuff) but SuSE is my new default boot.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[hyu]

That's funny. I had the same feelings about SuSE for quite some time. It's the only Linux system I'd run for more than a week without deleting. I had it as my exclusive system for a good month and a half with very pleasant results.

This weekend I picked up a Mac, and all that has changed. Now I don't want to use Windows or Linux. Mac OS X is too good, too slick, and truly does just work.

It's operating systems like OS X and SuSE that work intuitively to just about anyone willing to spend a small amount of time with it that will lead to Windows becoming an obsolete choice. I'd rather use OS X than SuSE, but I'd rather use SuSE than Windows.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[Cenuij]

You know what? Suse is the distro that actually did make me cut the windows cord. The only thing i missed for a while was playing some games, but since I discovered cedega that's a no brainer now too. Windows free and proud.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[MiKM]

I've never understood what "just works" means. From my experience, every operating system (Windows, Mac, *nix) always has some problem/missing feature that needs a workaround.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[smartsaga]

I disagree on the polished side. Perhaps it IS the most polished distro you have ever used, but it has been my experience that while it is good it is not that good. Just as an exmaple, I installed SUSE 10 on my Athlon 3000+ with 768 DDR RAM with 120GB HD with 8MB buffer. SUSE's configuration for performace simply sucks, it kept leaking memory and using all the RAM all the time. Just opening and closing programs would increase the RAM usage, damn it even just moving a window would use up more RAM. That is just half of it, the system monitor would also indicate that disk cache was using half the RAM all the time. That was on a clean install. After installing the ATI drivers the RAM usage wnet down just a little, but still SUSE would eat RAM little by little until a reboot was necesary.

I am now a Ubuntu user and the performace out of the box is great. And even better after installling the fgrlx drivers for my ATI.

I do agree in cutting the plug for Windows, but until I get my money back from all the software and games I bought that only run on Windows or all my Windows games and programs run on Linux, I cannot get rid of my windows partition.

Have a good one.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[heinousjay]

Have some of this Koolaid. Why, it's Aqua flavor, of course.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[gmuslera]

If performance issues worries you, maybe you would want to try SUPER (SUSE Performance Enhanced Release). Is one of the nice things of being open, that people start to build around it new approachs.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[Anonymous Coward]

Ekhm, it appears we have another someone who is clueless about how physical RAM is being allocated nowadays.

See, what you saw was actually pretty good. If you pay for RAM, it'd better be always utilized to the fullest extent by the OS. Instead of being 'empty', your RAM was put to some use and acted as a disk cache. It's a totally weird misconception that free RAM is good. It's not good. It's your investment being used to heat up your room and for no other reason. Think about it. That'd be a pretty expensive heater you've got there.

Cheers, Kuba

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[IANAAC]

Have you used Yast2 and looked at the supplementary wireless drivers available?

If not, I recommend it. They've worked hard (meaning with third parties) on wireless support.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[Jon-o]

I wasn't too pleased with it either - haven't used the most recent version, but I spent a little bit of time with the evaluation version last year. Seemed there were a lot of nice ideas, but a lot seemed kinda half-assed. Lots of stuff that would work really nicely if you used it just like they wanted you to use it, but then didn't support anything more esoteric. And then if you tried to go outside of the "standard stuff", you find undocumented and unfinished scripts and the like. I found it rather annoying... especially since it seemed relatively impossible to get help on it other than through the paid support, which I didn't pay for, of course. But it's really not the sort of distro I'm interested in - I much prefer the flexibility and transparency of Debian (fully realizing that half the transparency is a result of my knowing better where to look, having used Debian for about 8 years now). SuSE just seemed to have too much "do it our way, or don't do it at all!" mentality about it. But maybe if I used it more, I'd change my mind.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[swillden]

SUSE's configuration for performace simply sucks, it kept leaking memory and using all the RAM all the time.

Hmm. You say it "leaked" memory, but what you described doesn't sound like leakage at all.

Just opening and closing programs would increase the RAM usage, damn it even just moving a window would use up more RAM. That is just half of it, the system monitor would also indicate that disk cache was using half the RAM all the time.

Only half? A perfectly ideal operating system would use all of your system's RAM all of the time. The RAM not being actively used by running programs should ideally all be used to store stuff from your hard drive that you're going to need shortly so that it's quick to access it when you need it. Unfortunately, in the real world your OS has no way of knowing what data you will need ten seconds from now, so it has to fall back on just keeping in memory the stuff that you already needed, on the theory that if you needed it once, there's a good chance you'll need it again. After all, it costs nothing to keep that stuff in memory. If some program actually needs the memory, then the OS will simply "evict" the cached data to make room. This eviction process takes negligible time and requires no disk interaction so there's really no downside to it.

For example, my laptop has 1.5GiB of RAM, of which only about 100MiB is currently unused. The disk cache is presently consuming nearly 1.2GiB of RAM, all data that I've touched recently, I'm sure. I would be concerned if my disk cache *weren't* that large after my machine has been up for a few days, because it would indicate that the OS wasn't properly taking advantage of my system RAM. This is running Debian, BTW.

still SUSE would eat RAM little by little until a reboot was necesary.

So what you're saying is that just as the system really got around to making maximum use of your RAM to optimize system performance, you forced it to discard all of that information :-)

I am now a Ubuntu user and the performace out of the box is great.

Now this I find very odd. SuSE and Ubuntu both use very very similar kernel versions, and it's the kernel that does things like disk caching, so I find it difficult to believe that you'd see greatly different performance. Perhaps it's KDE vs GNOME? KDE may have more libraries that would tend to get cached, but I don't think the difference would be huge.

Re:Excusee-my-SuSE

[some guy I know]

At present, if she prints to the HP LJ4 she gets the square of the number of copies she requests

The workaround is easy: request the square root of the number of copies that she actually needs.
For example, if she wants 5 copies, she should request 2.2360679775 copies.
Simple, no?

Why do people always review the install?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people always review the install? I mean seriously, who gives a shit. I haven't heard anyone complaining about an install since 2000, and even in 1998 it really wasn't that hard with some documentation scribbled on a napkin. There's even a howto for installing linux on the carcass of a dead badger.

Microsoft isn't pushing their OS for its easy install. You never hear about OS X's install.

Why is linux judged by it's ease of install!? Who gives a flying rats ass. Does it work after it's installed? Probably not every well.

Re:Why do people always review the install?

[saskboy]

I don't see how this got an insightful moderation, since it's just a troll.

How many people you know have bought a computer with Linux pre-installed, or comes with Linux recovery CDs? Macs come with OS-X already on it, so people don't tend to install it. If a Linux distro doesn't have a friendly install process, then its not going to be accepted by the masses. It's nothing personal against Linux, it's just a fact of the market place, and getting Linux's foot in the computer door.

Re:Why do people always review the install?

[i_should_be_working]

His point was that since every distro has a very easy install these days (with the exception of some distros that aren't meant for noobs) there's no point in talking about the install in a review. It's a waste of space and time.

For distros like SUSE, Mandriva etc. the only thing that needs to be said about the install is 'it's easy'.

Way too many reviews talk about the install way too much and then don't spend enough space talking about how it is to actually use the distro.

What a media-rich Distro Review

[BlueRayMan]

http://madpenguin.org/images/reviews/suse10/siia/s use10install.html

I've never seen a Flash movie of a Linux distro install before! Nice.

I tested the boot.iso on an XP box, until it failed to detect that I was using a MN-510 (a usb wireless networking adapter made by Microsoft.)

So thumb's up on this review -- but the distro is not a smashing success, because it fails to properly embrace the MS switcher. The test is not can we install it--it's "can the previous generation..."

Re:What a media-rich Distro Review

[MoogMan]

Well, to be fair, my parents haven't got a clue what a device driver is, neither could they install Windows XP from scratch. I wouldn't be suprised if a huge majority of other parents were similar.

Re:Which distro to recommend ?

[Hakubi_Washu]

I'd say hand them a Knoppix or similar LiveCD (doesn't really matter which) to fool around with and get over the initial shock.

Then, if they are Win PowerUsers (aka don't sweat poking .lnks and the occasional cmd), hand them any Distro you like (I personally have a sweet spot for SuSE though it has some horrible decisions in directory structure, etc. and I openly hate Ubuntu, which I consider an absolute interface-nightmare in the default, LiveCD configuration. Debian, Gentoo, etc. are probably too arcane, let them discover the fun of that later on their own). Let them do installation, etc. on their own, but babysit them.

If they are simple users (no experience in unix or DOS doesn't make that so, but if they've never used a cmdline it gets tough) the first thing to ask is, honestly, do THEY want to learn Linux or do YOU want them too (I've myself been guilty of that)? If it's actually them you should probably install the LiveCD they had to play with, so they're not confused by another change so soon. And make damn sure they come to you before trying to install some software (people get nervous breakdowns when first encountering the "Linux way")

Hardware support

[applecrumble]

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. For example, I'm sure Novell would love to have native drivers for every wireless card out there, but if the companies won't co-operate, the best they can do is the ugly hack of using the win32 driver wrapped in an emulation layer. It's similar to complaining about why you can't play Playstation 2 games on Xbox hardware; the latter was never designed to work on the former and Microsoft wouldn't offer any help to get it working, but that doesn't mean Playstation 2 games are rubbish.

geek sweat

[BushCheney08]

...but here we are in a world where SUSE is open and still making geeks sweat every time a new release comes out

I'm fairly certain the geeks would still be sweating regardless of whether a new version of SuSE came out...

And totally unrelated, how cool would it have been if Digital Research had owned SuSE at one point? I would have loved to have a machine running DR-SuSE sitting around the office.

Re:Which distro to recommend ?

[Malor]

Tell them to try LiveCDs first, just to tinker. They let you play with Linux with zero commitment. Just be sure to explain that a 'real' install will be a lot faster, because it runs from the hard drive.

When you're ready for a hard drive install, I've been recommending Mandrake/Mandriva for new users for several years now. I started using it in the 8.X series, and after a short readjustment period, it was a total Windows replacement for me. I felt a lot MORE productive on Mandrake than on Windows, once I'd figured it out. It had some rough edges, but overall worked very, very well.

I've used a lot of Linux desktops over the years (Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat up to the 7.X series, Slackware, SLS), and I've always thought Mandrake was the best. (though Ubuntu is pretty nice too... you might want to try both.)

I don't have any experience with Suse, because for a long time you had to pay to get the best install options. The free version was purposely awkward to install, so I never bothered with it. Suse's loss, too... I liked Mandrake and I've sent them, geeze, three or four hundred bucks by now, probably. I just didn't want to pay BEFORE seeing the product. Now that they're more GPL-ish, they may be a very good spot for new users to tinker. I'll download and play with this one and see what's up with it.

For your friends, though, definitely start them on LiveCDs. They're easy to use, cheap to download and burn, and if they aren't impressed, all they have to do is shut down and eject the CD.

Suse 10 Rocks!

[canuck57]

Novell has made some interesting changes in distribution and development since our last review of SUSE Linux

I plugged Suse 10 Eval into my Sony portable and damm, the wireless 54G with my D-Link G650 shone bright! Noisy too, the sound card worked like a charm. Plugged in the WEP key for the G650 and on the air I was.

This is a smooth install for average users.... developers will have to head back and load gcc and stuff but what a hoot. Get to use Evolution with PGP, will not need 63 patch bundles and installs quickly. Office (openoffice) tools are included, but a few were missing on the intial install but were on the CD.

Now off to get MythTV....

Upgrading was a pain and other issues

[AaronW]

I ran into several issues when I upgraded from 9.3 to 10 last weekend.

In some ways I think SuSE 10 is worse than 9.3... I ran into a number of issues, usually with YaST.

First of all, the SCSI device list changed and it would not mount my RAID drives... a quick edit of /etc/fstab fixed that, but YaST was useless. What I hate is that the new YaST install would not allow me to go in and fix it during the upgrade process. I believe I was able to edit this in previous versions.

Second, the YaST printer tool refused to work properly... it would just hang every time I tried to run it, as did lpoptions and just consume the CPU. I finally managed to get that working after manually deleting a number of configuration files and rebooting. For the life of me I still can't figure out why rebooting worked.

Third, I ran into more YaST problems with my sound card. YaST somehow got corrupted and would not allow me to edit or delete my sound card settings to reconfigure it. After deleting a bunch of configuration files and reinstalling I got that working.

Fourth, Like 9.3, SuSE does not work with my TV capture card... it used to work with the 8.2 and I think 9.0 and worked, though without sound, in 9.3. It's a Pinnacle PCTV Studio PRO capture card based off of a standard BTTV chip.

And last but not least, SuSE no longer includes a DVD with all of the source RPMs. This wouldn't be so bad, but I've spent the last two days trying to download the Xorg source RPM from their incredibly slow FTP site so I can apply a patch to it to use my Logitech MX1000 mouse properly... I applied the patch to previous versions to enable the Linux event mechanism from a Gentoo patch I found. This is what really pisses me off. Also, it looks like all of the DVD and CD ISOs are mirrored, but not the source files.

I still have a ways to go to see how the upgrade went, but this is my first impression. Oh, and during the upgrade it barfed on the quicktime library include files... renaming and moving /usr/include/quicktime fixed that.

I've upgraded a few other machines which have much simpler installs that went a lot better, but still not without a couple of incidents.

Part of the problem with YaST is just trying to figure out which files each part of YaST is trying to use and is barfing on.

All in all, so far I think SuSE 10 is a little less reliable than 9.3... I was hoping it would be better because I really need to upgrade my home server which has been running over 2 years without a reboot running SuSE Professional 8.2, which as far as I can tell is their best release to date in terms of stability. Sadly, SuSE has pulled all of their patches and is no longer supporting this version, or if they are I certainly cannot afford it for a home machine.

Hopefully for 10.1 they'll have things better stabilized as well as have support for S.M.A.R.T. for SATA, which is another thing I want for when I rebuild my server.

Some things worked quite well, but there is still a long way to go.

-Aaron

Using openSUSE 10 @ Home

[mymaxx]

I have tried several distros: Fedora, Mandrake/Mandriva and Ubuntu to name a few. So far, openSUSE 10 is the first to support both my Intel Pro/Wireless 2200 B/G wireless card with WPA support. All I had to do was download the firmware from the Intel site and use SUSE's wizards to get WPA configured.

Re:"hands down" and a real question

[kikensei]

Here are 10 or 11 repositories of SuSE compile RPM's: http://www.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Re positories Here's how to install then as sources for YaST: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/11504. html I recommend Packman's excellent package site, from the first link. Once you add the sources, YaST performs essentially the same apt-get (or synaptic), resolves dependencies, and doesn't break stuff when you add new packages.

Just installed SuSE10 last night

[Billly Gates]

Pro:
- Very easy to use.
- Great distro for geeks who want to work in linux and not on linux spending a weekend or two to set everything up.
- Its a more professionally and less buggy compared to past versions of the distro and Novell brings a corporate appeal.
- SuSE10 automatically mounts windows paritions by default and sets up icons to the drives automatically no matter which wm you use. Great way to save time
- SuSE10 devfs automatically mounts devices and creates desktop shortcuts to the device such as my ipod-mini. No need to do it manually and adding a shortcut errr link

Cons:
- SuSE intentionally crippled its media player citing patent concerns on some codecs
- Nvidia can be added but the drivers are known to not be as stable as the windows versions. Bad if you are a cad user
- Software such as XFCE4 and other classics have been removed from the software repository. This means you have to install it yourself.
- Buggy still but alot better. I can't log into another other wm but gnome. If I create another user account I can do it with that account. Just not the one I setup. GDM/KDM will always pick gnome no matter which wm I select. Also my MS scrolling mouse which worked in previous versions of SuSE no longer works.
- KDM/GDM is hiddin and automatic logins are the default. This drove me absolutely mad as I like to log into different wm's. GDM configuration was removed from the gnome menu's. After pulling my hair out for 15 minutes I found it under the add user in yast??
- Yast is still slow as always.

So its a mix for me. I am keeping netbsd for serious work and SuSE in the meanwhile to do my regular work in since I dont have a good 2-3 weeks to configure NetBSD for my tastes.

And if you get even CLOSER...

[Junior J. Junior III]

It all starts looking like a bunch of 1s and 0s.

Youre' right...Sort of

[katharsis83]

You're right, I'm sure Linux developers would be happy to work on driver support if the manufacturers were more forth-coming. I'm also sure that most Linux developers are also saints who donate to UNICEF, help old ladies across the street, and also only say "LOL" when they're actually laughing. None of that's relevant.

The problem is that none of this matters to the end-user who's giving Linux a shot for the first time. It doesn't matter whose fault it is that their digital camera doesn't work, or why their laptop's sound card can't play back sound. You just lost a customer.

Re:Which distro to recommend ?

[Malor]

First, you have to realize that I'm pretty geeky... my experience may not translate well to Grandma or Uncle Joe.

My transition was almost accidental. I'd taken on a new job administering a network of Linux servers. I was provided a Windows desktop and several spare machines that I could use for whatever.. the prior administrator had liked to tinker with things. The Windows machine proved to be unreliable, and I was unable to determine if the company had paid for my Windows license at the time, so I just installed Mandrake on a spare box. I'd originally intended it as a secondary machine, but I ended up being happy enough that I never switched back, at least for work. (I still run Windows at home, mostly for gaming.)

After getting past the initial learning curve, I felt more productive because I had instant access to a huge range of powerful utilities. One of them, interestingly, was the humble bash shell. After settling in permanently and learning how to script properly (which I had never actually done before, though I'd been using Linux for years...I'd just not needed the ability sooner), I was able to automate a great many administrative tasks. That would have been much harder with Windows. I would have needed Cygwin, which is essentially Unix anyway. And screen and ssh were incredibly useful as well. I don't mean just the basic command-line ssh, but the remote-command, piping, port redirection, and proxying capabilities. That kind of thing is harder to do in Windows, and you definitely have to pay for it. (unless, of course, you use Cygwin, but it's still not native to the platform in quite the same way. If you're going to use free software anyway, might as well do it right.)

From a desktop perspective, I prefer Evolution to any other email client I've tried. It has the look and feel of Outlook, but is all Unixy underneath, so gluing in other programs is trivial. Adding in spam detection took very little time, for instance, and cost nothing, quite unlike the commercial alternatives. I loved the sorting rules and the ability to transparently support multiple email aliases (so I could be postmaster, webmaster, support, and my 'real' email address, without having to think much about them.) And I prefered Konqueror to any other browser I'd used up to that point. It ran faster, had tab support, and just in general struck me as superior to IE, except when it failed to render something. Fortunately, that wasn't terribly common, and Mozilla was there when Konqueror couldn't handle it. (Firefox wasn't out at the time I was making the transition.) And I absolutely loved the High Performance Liquid theme in KDE.

Multiple workspaces was a big productivity boost once I figured out how to organize it.... web browsing in one screen, email in another, remote jobs in a third (abstracted with the 'screen' utility so I could check up on things from home if I wanted), music player, network monitoring, and various random things (nethack!) in a fourth.

It's been quite awhile, so my memory has dimmed, but I believe but the rough edges were mostly determining how to get the hardware configured. Screen resolutions were a real pain. Getting sound working properly was also hard, and then determining/shopping for the best program to use for the different available functions. (I had quite a bit of experience with server Linux, but desktop Linux was pretty new to me.) A lot of this stuff was hard simply because related settings were spread all over multiple screens... they were organized by how the software was built, rather than by how people thought about the problem. Even now, the interfaces to system configuration stuff tend to be much harder than they should be.

Overall, there just weren't any artificial barriers between me and the system. It was still easy to use, but it was easy without hiding the power underneath. Windows abstracts things but then makes it very hard to get down to brass tacks, past the abstractions. Linux isn't like that. If you want to see ho

Re:Details & Packman's!

[10Ghz]

KDE: I'll say it again, from Kmail there's no print selection feature. My hope is KDE 4.0 will have that feature.

That's a roadblock on Linux'es way of "widespread adoption"? there's no "print selection" feature in Kmail? Uh, OK....

Hardware issues: I've got a usb keyboard that doesn't kick-in on boot sometimes.

My experiences are completely the opposite. I too have an USB-keyboard (Apple Keyboard in fact). I plugged in in to my Gentoo-box while it was running. System detected it without any problems and I could use it right away. What happened in Windows? I plugged it in, but I couldn't use it. It needed to install some drivers. I installed the drivers, and the machine rebooted. But I still couldn't use the keyboard, I had to plug in my old PS2-keyboard so I could log in! It installed even more drivers and rebooted. And it STILL did not work! It installed even more drivers and THEN it started to work!

No, it doesn't stop there. What happens if I unplug the keyboard and re-plug it in to a different USB-port? In Linux, it just works. But in Windows, it wont work untill I reinstall the drivers! Hello?! it's the same keyboard, only on different port!

FreeNX Comment...

[Chicane-UK]

From TFA: Microsoft has tried a similar approach with their remote desktop support built into Windows XP but, as usual, it's only a half-assed attempt at something the rest of the free world is doing properly.

Strange.. I find Remote Desktop on Windows one of the most easy to use and fully featured remote desktop systems on any operating system? Could someone please elaborate and tell me exactly what is so half arsed about it when compared to the competition?

Antialiasing???

[pato101]

I'm pretty happy with my aa fonts in my ubuntu box.
Five tricks:
1) Use gnome. (Sure a KDE guy may give you similar reciepes, nevertheless)
2) Use "bitstream vera sans" for GUI and "bistream vera sans mono" for terminals.
3) Use proper DPI value at "Details..." at gnome-font-properties dialog
4) Enable Subpixel LCD at LCD displays, also there.
5) Enable "RenderAccel" option at xorg.conf if you are using nvidia card with nvidia drivers (just for performance issues)

My fonts look better than my wife's XP.

Random thoughts on SUSE 10

[DrXym]

Some random thoughts

1. Installation is a no brainer. For some bizarre reason it showed me a winter scene with penguins. Weird. One oddity is that during bootup there is an option to "Press ESC for more details" fine, except once you press ESC no way to switch back to the less details mode.
2. SUSE offers GNOME or KDE. GNOME is 2.12, it works great but integration with SUSE is horrible. The menus are cluttered with crap (e.g. do I really need the choice of 4 console apps in a default GNOME install?), Beagle isn't enabled by default and other niggles pervade. It almost feels like an afterthought. The SUSE crew might not like GNOME, but Novell owns Ximian so its hard to fathom why it looks so sloppy. Novell really has to start cracking a whip and get its teams working in the same direction.
3. YaST is a very powerful configuration tool. It's not exactly task sensitive or user friendly but it does a good job. It had no problem detecting my hardware although configuring a monitor was considerably more difficult than it should have been. To get a decent refresh rate I had to manually change the vertical and horizontal refresh rates of the settings. How many people are going to bother with that?
4. YaST is an ugly, ugly application. It doesn't look like a GNOME app. It doesn't even look like a KDE app. I think it's been statically linked to QT a default an ugly theme. I can understand that static linking removes dependency hell but the least they could do is make it resemble the default theme.
5. SUSE looks a lot better in KDE. I hate KDE to be honest, but I think I'm going to have to get used to it.
6. I finally got a chance to play with MonoDevelop. I just couldn't get it to work on FC4 but it works fine here. To be honest it's got a long, long way to go. I wonder if Mono shouldn't be looking at #Develop which is miles better but needs porting first.
7. I have an NVidia card. "For legal reasons" I discovered the software installer downloads the driver manually. This process could be improved, such as offering to restart X after installing your new driver.
8. FreeNX - yippee! Requires manual configuration including new firewall rules - boo!
9. OpenOffice 2.0 - I like. Ximian seem to have had their hands in here since it is the "Novell Edition" with different icons.
10. SUSE 10 contains a lot of Java stuff (including my favourite editor JEdit) but Eclipse is strangely not included. Also weird is that it ships Java 1.4 rather than 1.5.
11. The software update system works a lot better than FC4. It could be my imagination, but is it really using incremental patches? If so well done.
12. By default SUSE is set to boot straight into my normal user account without prompting for a password. I don't like this. I switched it off manually. Perhaps it was an option in the installer, but it wasn't something I noticed or would expect to look for. Perhaps the first time you start it should ask you if you want to continue with that behaviour or use a password from now on.
13. In common with most dists, multimedia is a complete disaster zone. If certain codecs can't be supported for "legal reasons", at least put in a dummy codec for the format which says this and tells you a link that you can go to. In other words make it a no brainer to get codecs. After all, SUSE do something similar with NVidia and other drivers.

Over all I like SUSE 10. It works fine, but I still don't think it is ready for a novice user. GNOME is a mess and there are rough / jagged edges around configuration and multimedia which would easily catch out a novice. As a power desktop it seems to be a very nice environment.

Easier to redistribute as well

[Anonymous Bullard]

SUPER sounds like a grand idea to spread the SUSE community wider outside corporate confines.

1-CD Installs (performance-patched with Minimal, KDE and GNOME-centric sets) in particular are very welcome as the official SUSE and SUSE-OSS DVDs or 5-CD sets are on the heavy side and most users don't need anywhere near the full set of packages included there. The 1-CD Install set, as Ubuntu has already shown, keeps the user experience simple (while allowing for future expansion) and lowers the barrier for user-to-user proliferation of the distro.

The growing community around the OSS distro versions also helps Novell/SUSE to grow the momentum and mindshare of their commercial and supported releases. It'll be easier for Novell/SUSE to sell systems and support to businesses and other institutions when there may already be people around who are familiar and comfortable with their widely available free-for-all offerings. It'll also encourage third parties to pay more attention to making SUSE compatible packages.

I hope they'll get around to creating the planned liveCD version of SUPER as well, as an easily redistributable alternative to the current liveDVD offering.

FWIW, since Ubuntu stormed the scene I've mainly promoted it to people interested in trying out Linux, but for the technically-inept I've still recommended a SUSE box. These new OSS versions, and in particular the planned liveCD version, would dramatically lower the barrier of trying SUSE out but I'd still recommend a box set for the inexperienced users due to their better QA, less breakage and availability of official support.