LinuxQuestions.org - Impressions of SuSE 10.0

I have to admit that I have never been a big fan of SuSE, but so far I think Novell has made some real improvements with 10.0.

As a long time Slackware user, I'm not a fan of automated configuration tools but so far it seems SuSE has finally gotten them working well enough that they don't seem to create more problems than they solve.

I downloaded, burned, and installed the 64 bit evaluation version DVD of 10.0 pretty much expecting the same sort of thing I've seen from SuSE in past releases. I was pleasantly surprised to find that all of my hardware was detected and configured correctly without much input from me during the installation process.

I checked out the system config files after the installation and amazingly enough everything was configured correctly which is something SuSE had never been able to pull off in the past.

After some initial confusion on my part with how Novell had set up the repositories for the 64 bit version, I set up the repositories list in YAST and proceeded to do some updates and application installations. Imagine my surprise when YAST actually performed it's dependency checking correctly! In the past this had been a real sore spot with me and YAST as it invariably claimed dependency problems/missing dependencies when none actually existed.

The x86_64 version runs reasonably quickly (almost as quickly as the 32 bit version of Slack) and so far I am fairly impressed with it. SuSE had, in the past, loaded up a lot of services that I realy didn't want, and expected the same this time. Turned out there were only a couple of services I had to shut down.

I think Novell is heading in the right direction with SuSE 10.0, and I can easily see it becoming a very popular desktop distribution.

In some ways, it has a little too much of a "Windows" feel with the YOU updates and SuSEwatcher, but that's not a completely bad thing, especialy for someone migrating from Windows to Linux.

All in all I would have to say that my impressions of SuSE 10.0, at least the x86_64 version, are very favorableand I would recommend it to a a person looking to migrate to Linux.