I had a question reguarding SuSe's Automatic Update, how reliable is this feature of this distro and what do you all think of the SuSe distro? I'm using 8.2 with Gnome, and I dunno..I'm a previous user to Gentoo, so I'm a little portage tree spoiled. I guess also my question is how stable is this distro? It seems very user friendly, even if one has no previous knowledge of the Linux OS. But uhhhhh, I just don't know ... comments?

From what I've experienced, Red Hat distros seem to be more stable. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but alot of times, certain applications crash on startup or just refuse to start. They're not important applications like office software, just games and other like programs. Still, this does add to the overall annoyance level.

I prefer KDE to GNOME though, as I find the interface alot more visually pleasing. While SuSE 8.2 does come with quite alot of packages, in my opinion they do not provide enough. GTK+ is absent, and finding a source that will actually install correctly is almost as hard as finding an RPM of the file, which would make installing tons easier.

Of course, I need this file (and dependencies) to upgrade the archaic version of Gaim they included (v0.59.8), which leads me to my next gripe. With Red Hat 8, I was able to upgrade to the new version, directly connect, and send and recieve files to my friends who are still running Windows. I cannot do any of the above, in this case.

I mainly switched distros because RH8 didn't have much support for hardware. I had to manually configure my cable modem before it was usable, and my sound card wouldn't work at all until I tweaked my BIOS. Maybe there's better support in RH9, but until I know for sure, I may as well stick with SuSE.

I would have tried Mandrake, but nowhere I know of carries it and I'll be damned if I'm going to download all those files off of an FTP and try my hand at manually installing the entire operating system.

To put it simply, SuSE definitely is not the best distro out there. Granted its all a matter of opinion, I've never been able to "like" this distro. At best, I can tolerate it.

Hope that answers any questions.

The only thing about thier Update service that I didnt like was if you installed non-SuSE packages-in my case,upgrading to the latest cdr-tools and XCD-Roast-it would actually downgrade the package(s) back to the version(s) that came with your copy of SuSE.
lynch

Never tried that, though I do dislike how you can't just download packages you don't have already through the YOU update. That would make things tons easier. Is anyone from the SuSE team listening?

Probably not.

Ican completely agree with the aforementioned gripes aboiut SuSE ; took me over a year to finally get it running somewhat stable.
It requires an awfull lot of suffering the "Dependency-Hell©".
For every package , not originally on the SuSE cds , I had to search for numerous others , in order to solve it.

I just found a Suse forum:

http://www.suseforums.com/support/

You may try to post your question there.