In my gereral experience, if SuSE linux doesnt work with a piece of hardware, then it either doesnt work with linux, its a pretty obscure item, or there are devel drivers being made.

I am yet to find a distro that is better at detecting and setting up out of the box various pieces of hardware.

I just wish they would hurry up and ship 7.3 boxed sets to Australia

The only trouble that I had with my new box & SuSE 7.2 was that POS PCTel modem that came with it. I solved that by getting a USR internal (besides, I spell modem U-S-R)


Mandrake does a great job too, but I always find myself booting back up into SuSE, I just like it better (it has better support for Kde for one thing).

I don't know what is giving kzin trouble in 7.1, but I don't recall any show-stoppers (Kde theme support seems a bit whacked. Turn it on, and the menus disappear...)

The RieserFS rocks, I hammered my box today (CivCTP took out X and apparently splattered all over my HD's), and it took less time to fix it then it took to read this Yea, buddy!


You've got that right! I haven't got it here either (the SuSE site says that it was released 10/22/01, it sure seems like it's been longer than that...) I am beginning to really bug the CompUSA guys...


And SuSE has its drawbacks, as one poster pointed out earlier, their support is nearly non-exsistant, it really is a joke. SuSE needs to fix this...

However their support DB is great, and that is usually all it takes to find a solution.


Besides, you wouldn't have to look hard to find flaws in the other distros either, so I'm not going to slam SuSE too hard

Besides, I could always create my own distro, eh?


John

Without trying to sound elitist or arrogant, support is something i never ever use.

If I were to take that into consideration when rating all my distros, then they would score pretty low. Phone support is non-existant here, and rather than wait for email support i just hop onto a site like this or irc. better still just head over to linuxdoc.org or google.com/linux.

My level of knowledge is getting to the point where if i cant quickly and easily work out what the problem is, its usually some obscure problem caused by multiple factors, and due to this, people generally cant help me anyways so it's reading for me.

Me either, but it's because I feel it usually isn't worth the time to hang around on the phone when I can get better answers here.

This shouldn't be a surprise, the linux community has been known for this

http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/dis...97poy.supp.htm


John

I picked up the box set of SuSE 7.3 professional and it stung me for CDN$150 (about the price of a Happy Meal in $US ). I have to say it's well worth it even though I have yet to test the 90-day support. I've been on the SuSE bandwagon since 6.0 so my opinions are somewhat slanted towards them but I feel this is the best money I've spent on Linux to date. It's been very stable with my oddball hardware and I even got the TV tuner working in my ATI All-In-Wonder Pro.

As for Hardware support - I have chosen to purchase hardware from vendors that are more Linux friendly. Period. Whenever I buy a new device I make a point of informing other vendors (via a copy of my regitration) that I chose to do business with one of thier competitors for the sole purpose of compatibility. I own several computers - they are not Microsoft PCs - just computers. One runs Windows (for testing), another for Solaris (well it's trying to) and the rest run Linux. The common attitude is that a PC just isn't a PC unless it's got Windows on it. Hardware vendors fell into that cycle and it's going to hurt them if they maintain it (Logitech is a prime example).

It's good to see that there are so many strong distibutions on the market today; RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Slackware, etc... It doesn't really matter which one you choose - you can get your applications (from source if you have to) to work in either one of them. You're never really stuck in one 'upgrade path'. This is one of main strengths of Linux. That and the lack of BSODs!

SuSE is usually great, and it's been around awhile, I still have an early 5.2 CD laying around

I'm having some trouble with 7.3, the programs don't always want to load up. It acts like it's loading them and eventually times out.

That and the pppd dies all of the time (what a PITA!)

Hmmm....


Now that is an accomplishment



Have you been here? It's run by my buddy Michael Holve (of EverythingLinux fame)

http://www.everythingsolaris.org


John

have to chime in...i'll lather up with the flame-retardant in a minute...kidding! kidding!

i've had a bit different experience with suse73- it was very, very easy to install. i don't think i cracked one of the manuals- i got the pro version up and running in about an hour, re-parttioning and all- i now have 2k and suse on my amd t-bird and am diggin' it. this dist is seriously stacked with stuff. i can't even begin to explain how crazy it was, as a linux newbie, to see all the instalation options...<drooling>... even fun toys! and who doesn't like fun toys?

HOWEVER- i have found kde to be much less than stable. the taskbar often: loads incorrectly...refreshes incorrectly...and sometimes stops responding altogether, thus requiring restart. it only started acting up after i customized it, and installed the recommended updates that are already out....hmmmmm.....

so in my humble, newbie opinion, SuSE7.3 is great, but not spectacular. there still seems to be gui issues. although, as i learn more about linux, the less i care about gui anyway.

j0da

have to chime in...i'll lather up with the flame-retardant in a minute...kidding! kidding!

i've had a bit different experience with suse73- it was very, very easy to install. i don't think i cracked one of the manuals- i got the pro version up and running in about an hour, re-parttioning and all- i now have 2k and suse on my amd t-bird and am diggin' it. this dist is seriously stacked with stuff. i can't even begin to explain how crazy it was, as a linux newbie, to see all the instalation options...<drooling>... even fun toys! and who doesn't like fun toys?

HOWEVER- i have found kde to be much less than stable. the taskbar often: loads incorrectly...refreshes incorrectly...and sometimes stops responding altogether, thus requiring restart. it only started acting up after i customized it, and installed the recommended updates that are already out. and rootboy is totally right, OFTEN apps simply time out without loading...this is especialy true for netscrape. although i dig konquerer...so, meh.

so in my humble, newbie opinion, SuSE7.3 is great, but not spectacular. there still seem to be gui issues. although, as i learn more about linux, the less i care about gui anyway.

j0da