Having recently spoken with Psycho275 about SuSE and his recent switch I decided to give it a go. I managed to mess up my Ubuntu installation, it could have been fixed but I couldn't be bothered as I'm getting a new hard drive soon and though I may aswell just trial SuSE.

My plan was to use it until I get my new drive however I don't see how that's going to be possible as I have found I hate using SuSE lol. Suse is lacking a decent package management system such as Apt with Synaptic. I tried installing Apt and then Synaptic but run into problem with a missing gksudo command, could be fixed but why should I have to fix such basic things?

YaST the much touted SuSE config tool is powerful but a total mess, ugly KDE icons with an equally ugly Win95 look. Some of the features on YaST are useful but I never had it before and didn't have a problem getting along with out it.

SuSE is a perfect example of how to mess up a Gnome system, KDE style menu with ugly icons, KDE apps litter the your system. The Gnome system menu has gone. Firefox has loads of preset links which I upon seeing them I instantly thought just like Windows do to IE. To top it all off where is the community? Scattered all around the internet, no central wiki or forums like with Ubuntu.

SuSE is probably a great KDE distro if you like that type of thing though I fail to see how Gnome users could stand using it, I certainly can't. I'm off to wipe it from my drive



4 Comments

Psycho275 Location: UK Joined: 12/06/05

Interesting thoughts, there. I agree with YaST being a mess - It is. I've now taken to using APT instead. The KDE icons are ugly, but can be changed. Also, I found that not installing any of KDE also helps! Your view on gksudo is interesting; After all, most distro's don't actually use it. No, it doesn't have a community - But I personally don't consider that to be an important thing. What you have to consider is that it hasn't been "out" all that long (Ubuntu has been around for a good year or two now), so no major community has developed.

Chris Location: West Midlands, UK Joined: 24/03/05

Well I couldn't get apt running, the KDE icons could be removed and I could reorganise the menu but why would I want to bother when Ubuntu has it spot on As for KDE as far as I know to I didn't select any of KDE just the Gnome desktop (I guess it secretly installs KDE stuff anyway). Sudo and GKsudo are great tools, I like the idea of having a root account you can't login to. Provides better security, my problem wasn't with the lack of Gksudo but that Synaptic wanted to use it and I couldn't find it lol. Nor could I find the "synaptic" command to bypass it yet it had a meny entry. SuSE has been around for years! Granted open SuSE has not but they are practically the same thing and still SuSE has a poor community not surprising though if their disto is like that lol . I'm back with Ubuntu now, I did try Slack before going back. Not a bad distro, nice installer and I certainly liked it more than SuSE but it was a distro for playing with and that's all very well but sometimes you might not have time to recompile a kernal you just want things to work with minimum effort.

Psycho275 Location: UK Joined: 12/06/05

I see what you mean; I think openSUSE is good, but could do with a bit more work regarding getting it to work with the minimum of effort. Personally, I prefer things to "just work". Although I intend to keep using openSUSE on my desktop, I plan to install Ubuntu alongside Windows on my new Laptop (which I keep meaning to blog about!). What is slack like? It has a reputation of being a bit of a pain as you have to compile a lot of programs from source. Granted, it may have performance benefits, but I do prefer things to be fairly easy.

Chris Location: West Midlands, UK Joined: 24/03/05

I first thought SuSE was faster but I thought I wait till I reinstall Ubuntu from fresh before drawing a conclusion. Well it's no faster at all really, It seems over time distros slow down just like Windows does and I have no idea why they do that. As for Slack well I didn't stick with it long enough to find out It was damn fast using XFCE though, much faster than Ubuntu with XFCE. I would have given it a good testing but I couldn't be bothered to find out how to install Gnome. According to the disk I was using it from it came with Dropline Gnome, perhaps you have to intall this later? I would say Slack would probably be my second favorite distro if you get Gnome on it and I spent a bit more time looking with it. Not too practical for getting things done quicky but certainly fun. I imagine it to be kind of like a Gentoo stage three installation

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