Those of you new to Linux considering what distro to purchase would be well advised to skip SuSE Office Desktop 8.1 based on our personal experience.

We spent a year researching Linux distros and actually believed SuSE Office Desktop to be a good means to migrate from Windoze to Linux. Needless to say: DO NOT BELIEVE ANY OF SuSE'S AD HYPE as their installation process was a disaster for us and has been for countless other customers, as we recently discovered... We were fortunate NOT to have our entire Windoze partitian wiped out by the Acronis partition resizing software, as others have experienced. As a result of Acronis NOT functioning properly we ended up purchasing a new HD exclusively for Linux use to the tune of $300.

Even after skipping the cobbled Acronis HD resizing routine, SuSE was unable to install a properly fucntioning US Robotics 5610B standard internal modem. SuSE's install routine also could not install a perfectly fine 3COM network, though it recognized that it existed. YaST2 was completely useless in that it would NOT install the above hardware even when properly manually configured.

So basically SuSE Office Desktop was completely unusable for our Biz as we need e-mail and Net access, neither of which SuSE's installation nor YaST2 could provide. SuSE's online help while better than their 360 page written user's manual, also turned out to be of no value as none of the installation options would install the hardware properly.

If you foolishly believe you are entitled to SuSE Tech Support because you paid for it with the purchase of a Retail package, think again. As we and many others have found out the hard way, SuSE virtually provides NO TECH SUPPORT for their product installations - neither by phone or by e-mail. You get absolutely NOTHING from SuSE and this has been documented by many other folks who's reports can be found online. Even experienced Linux users who do software reviews have commented on the incurable hardware problems with SuSE Linux distros.

BUYER BEWARE applies when considering SuSE products based on our experience because if it don't work, you basically just threw your money and time away. Clearly SuSE doesn't value your time or having you as a customer, as they act like they are doing you a favor by taking your money and providing absolutely nothing of value. The word fraud comes to mind after our very unpleasant experience with SuSE.

Your mileage may vary...

and Suse is supposed to be one of the most polished distros there is...

cg

IMHO, latest suse releases are turning out as nothing but CRAP .. i mean it C R A P.

If you want an out of the box does what it says on the tin don't want to get your hands dirty distro then I found Suse 9.0 Pro to be excellent.

IMO

In SuSE's defence - 9.0 Pro has been nothing but great for me. It auto-detected all of my hardware and the set up worked great out of the box. I don't know of anyone who used 8.1 for any length of time - most use 8.2 and all of the comments I have seen have been positive.

raceware.

You offer no proof of the actual problems which you experienced and the steps you took to correct such problems. Also, the fact that you have only 2 posts at this forum indicates that your only intention is to hurt Linux in general and Suse in particular.

A common term is "troll" and nothing useful from it.

Go away

I think Suse (8.2 & 9.0), Mandrake, and Red Hat/Fedora are probably the three best distros to refer people to that are migrating from Windows. Your bad experience, as you are trying to make us believe, shouldn't be indicative on the distro that you use(d). I've used Suse 8.2 and 9.0 with no problems, and for someone looking for an out of the box setup that just works you can't really go wrong with Suse unless you try to set it up in a way it was intended to.

Just my 2 cents.

rberry88

Those of you new to Linux considering what distro to purchase...
Ah, so this is not a warning to those successfully using Suse. That's kind of odd.
We spent a year researching Linux distros...
So what kind of set up did you have. What were you trying to move to? Were any of the technical people knowledgeable with Linux or Unix? Which Linux system did you use instead that is running fine now?
Perhaps everyone that heeds your advice to avoid Suse would be interested in the solution you have found and how you have implemented it.

Moving this flame to Distributions where Distro related comments/questions ought to go

Cool

The problems this person seems to be having relate to the SuSE Desktop edition rather than the Personal or Professional editions. I am afraid I haven’t had any experience with the Desktop edition but have found the Professional versions of 7.1 and 8.2 to be great. Now, having said that, if you take a look through this and other forums for my posts, you will see that at times I was getting quite frustrated with installation and setup of the different SuSE distros and that is simply because I didn’t know a thing about Linux or Unix when I started, I wouldn’t even say I was very experienced with WinNT Server either. Now, long after those late nights and hair pulling panic sessions, I have a server that is so stable and wonderful I never have to turn on its monitor. In fact, I rarely have to open up webmin or change anything on Samba, my office runs much smoother and our IT cost dropped dramatically.

I was talking to a friend who works in the Belfast Novell office and he was regaling me on Novell’s ambitions for SuSE and one thing he did say is that future version should be an absolute breeze to install.

Basically, if the installation didn’t work for you, don’t panic or give up, have a cup of coffee and a smoke post some questions, have another cup of coffee while you wait for answers. If SuSE doesn’t work in the end, try another distro one of them is sure to work for you and once working, you will not be disappointed.

isnt a us robotics pci modem a winmodem ?
(which would explain alot)

is this guy saying they spent a whole year reasearching linux distro's, but didnt bother checking the hardware compatability list ?????

and my kernel supports 3com ethernets... a simple kernel re-compile never killed any-one.

let this be a lesson that distro differences are more than just eye candy.

I would love to hear specific arguments. Why exactly is SuSE crap in the last releases?
From what I know and have seen SuSE is kind of a different distro, that tries to make it all sooo easy, like in windows.
The drawbacks are that (I have heard, never tried it myself) you cannot edit config files directly, you need to use the frontend (yast2), which does surely not run on text only, so here you get windows, glued to a fat (slow on smaller machines) gfx frontend that takes you hostage.

Well, anyway: For the ones that don't know it, winmodems (internal modems) run really bad on linux. Could not get mine in my laptop to work and if you need to get a modem, get an external one, they work fab.
So that is not a problem of SuSE, that is a problem of Linux. Or of the HW producers that don't write drivers for linux.
I think we will get there someday and maybe my wish is going to come true and we will not need modems anywhere anymore and all you get is a RJ45 plug in your home or hotel.

So I would very much like to hear deficiencies of SuSE (since I heard good already), but specific ones. Or was this thread just created to vent anger?


Off I go to compile my 2.6 ;-)
Like xmas.

Quote:

Originally posted by qwijibow isnt a us robotics pci modem a winmodem ? (which would explain alot)

US Robotics makes some Linux ok modems, I believe all the Sportsters are win modems.