[Discuss] SUSE looks good!

[John Blomfield]

I have been installing a few distributions on an a spare computer that I 
can use for a demo at the new BB&C Linux SIG and I cannot resist drawing 
your attention to the SuSE 10.3 distro.  I don't normally try a lot of 
different distros since I found Fedora suited most of my needs and once 
you find out where everything is in a distro its too much like hard work 
to keep changing.  But for the Linux SIG I thought I had better make the 
effort and so far I have installed Debian, Ubuntu / Kubuntu, Fedora and 
now SuSe.  I have one more empty partition to fill on my box and my 
thought is to try Mandiva (but if I asked I am sure you all have your 
favorite alternatives).  I have tried to stick to the major distros that 
are well supported and maintained.  I prefer to try full installations 
rather than just Live CD's since you can better see how they really do 
stuff.

Most distros all do the basic command line stuff and have up to date 
kernels etc, so my criteria for a good distribution is how easy does it 
make it to administrator the system, display its information and status, 
recognize its hardware, provide a driver database, manage and update 
software, provide a comprehensive repository of stable software and 
finally provide a pleasing, easy to use, graphical interface.  I believe 
Linux has begun to increase its market share because of these attributes 
often not universally loved by the command line experts.  I tend to use 
command line for quick often repeated tasks and otherwise when there is 
no GUI to do the job for me. If I have to grab a book or search on line 
for the appropriate command or scroll through pages of man to find the 
appropriate switch or option, I start to think I need to write a GUI.

So back to SuSe! The last time I used SuSe was five years ago and 
release 8.2 (they don't seem to change their major release numbers 
often, i.e 10.3 to 8.2 in five years!)  It is now unrecognizable from 
those days and stuffed full of really useful GUI's for just about 
everything.  Lots of systems info all nicely displayed with the standard 
KDE desktop, no extra searching for the right packages to install.  
Powerful configuration GUI's for hardware, servers and clients.  I have 
always thought Fedora was good but SuSe I think is better.  The only 
qualification I have so far is that some of the development packages are 
not the latest stable releases, e.g. qt4.3.1 instead of qt4.3.3 but this 
may be cautious quality control checking.  My bias is that I prefer KDE 
to Gnome and SuSe supports KDE well (I haven't tried the SuSe Gnome 
version yet).

Try it!

John Blomfield