Hi Salmanq,

Why not post your question(s) in a new thread this forum? You'll get far more replies that way.

I bought a couple of versions of suse. It was and still is very popular around here (austria). 9.3 was awesome. In fact that was when I switched 90% of my computing needs to linux. But all the stuff that I wished they would get resolved got increasingly worse. On top of it all the yast package manager. I used smart on 10.0, but I already started trying other distros, and found Ubuntu to be the least painful. I ran debian for a while because they had a lowlatency kernel that I didn't have to compile myself, but since Feisty Ubuntu has that too, and it's even officially supported.

I still think suse is the sexiest distro out there. Everything works together graphically. And I looove the chameleon.

openSUSE 10.3 looks great, they really cleaned it up from 10.2.

However, it's even more bloated and dumbed down, feels more and more like windoze. Runs slower than XP too. It's great if you want your hand held.

Most of the software I want to run on my servers supports debian first, then *maybe* suse support. Too many apps are a big pain to get working on suse (I'm playing with GOsa right now). I never did get ldap+samba to play right on 10.2, seems like they ignored it.

Debian is looking good so far...

In case anybody is still watching this thread,

Here is how Kubuntu went: the only distro I have installed apart from Suse.

My Suse 9.1 was getting quite wobbly at boot. Also it would slowly lose its grip on hardware over a period of days: e.g. first there's no networking, then there's so printing, then a problem with the CD drive... and so on.

So I was afraid to turn it off.
In addition, my Windows box decided that it won't boot.

So I bought a new box and a Kubuntu disc, and a ZenWalk Live CD.

I wanted 7.10, but the person sent me Feisty Fawn instead. Never mind. I'll upgrade later and evidently avoid some teething probs with the first wave of Gibbons.

Installed Kubuntu today:
Lucky I bought the ZenWalk with that -- because the first thing that happened with Kubuntu was that QTParted mucked up a simple partitioning of my brand new drive into four partitions.

Looked on the Kubuntu forum and found that everybody seemed to agree: use only Gparted.
Luckily I had Gparted on the ZenWalk cd to fix the mess.

After that: Installed Kununtu, no problems.
Internet OK
Sound OK
First, I installed one of my must-haves, Gkrellm.

Installed Flash 9: it went into a fit when installing as root and had to be killed. But went okay installing into home dirs.

Just now downloaded my second wave of (heaps of) applications.

I am still expecting I will install IceWM on this box. But I must say KDE is running fast and not causing any trouble.

I am surprised at what is NOT in the default list of apps: I haven't found eterm or xterm -- what on earth do Kubuntu people use for a totally cool borderless transparent terminal?

I don't see Hylafax.
I still have a lot to install and configure before I'm ready for daily work.

The only thing I'm missing, as compared to a Suse installation, is the convenience with Suse of having so many applications right on the disk.

Now if I can only get Suse to network for an hour or two I will copy my data over to the new box...

Anyway, thanks people for all the useful info you have put on this thread.

Although I am not yet a defector, I am reasonably sure openSUSE will soon become a relic of my Linux past. Version 10.0 was very good for its day, version 10.1 was a disgrace, and version 10.2 was good. With version 10.3 they fixed the update, but unfortunately, the repair function does not work on the 10.3 DVD and I am having problems with sound and getting some applications to work as well--so it's one step forward and three steps back. How they can have problems like this on a release that took them 10 months to create is beyond my understanding. Maybe it's because they are now "partnered" with Microsoft and the desktop and open source are now less important to them.

Anyway, for those of you who have been around long enough to be willing to make a jump to a "command line" type install, consider Arch. (A new release with a mildly improved installer, 2007.11, is due to be released this week.) Although the setup may be mildly frustrating, once it is installed and working, that's it. Arch has a rolling release, so you never need to "upgrade" again. Just apply updates and you are as current as anyone else. Although it should work fine with all desktop environments, it seems to work a little better with KDE than GNOME. I never really spent much time using window managers by themselves, but reports from other Arch users state that they work well.

I've used quite a few distros over the years....I use Linux almost exclusively, and I've found SUSE to most reliably work on my systems and make the resources I need available easily. I just built up a new system and tried Fedora, Sabayon, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, SUSE 10.3, and one other...... I forget which, and discarded all but the SUSE 10.3 (64 bit) for various reasons. The "buntu" distributions frustrated me in terms of not making graphical tools for system configuration available.....at least I didn't find them. Sabayon was better and had a functional package manager, and I would probably have stayed with it for a couple of reasons.....but for some reason I could not graphically make folders in the version of KDE it contained..... or with Konqueror....... I'm spoiled by the windows like right click menu for these kinds of tasks, and Yast is a tremendous tool, consolidating all the configuration stuff I need in one place. I would sorely miss YaST in any distrib other than SUSE.

Howard

I've used quite a few distros over the years....I use Linux almost exclusively, and I've found SUSE to most reliably work on my systems and make the resources I need available easily. I just built up a new system and tried Fedora, Sabayon, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, SUSE 10.3, and one other...... I forget which, and discarded all but the SUSE 10.3 (64 bit) for various reasons. The "buntu" distributions frustrated me in terms of not making graphical tools for system configuration available.....at least I didn't find them. Sabayon was better and had a functional package manager, and I would probably have stayed with it for a couple of reasons.....but for some reason I could not graphically make folders in the version of KDE it contained..... or with Konqueror....... I'm spoiled by the windows like right click menu for these kinds of tasks, and Yast is a tremendous tool, consolidating all the configuration stuff I need in one place. I would sorely miss YaST in any distrib other than SUSE.

Howard