Have just installed SUSE 10.2. The beta is now out, but this version is the alpha with nearly all the known annoyances fixed. This is not a real review. Its a straightforward description of my first moments with it. I have been using MEPIS 6.0 ever since my difficulties with YAST and SUSE 10.1. This was supposed to be a return peek at SUSE, looking for that rock-solid industrial strength stable distro, fast, easy to use, etc.

So maybe I getting harder to please, but..
1. That evil - looking green creature - the Feng Shui is just terrible. Its hard enough that SUSE/Novell are wedded to its iconic brand recognition. I could never have it on any desktop at that magnification, but I allow that this is a personal preference. Even so, if were to take a poll of "cutest most appealing logo" would the gekko score real high?

2. Click the gekko menu symbol, and be treated to a horizontally tabbed version of Microsoft's XP "start" switch. I use Windows. There are some great apps, but in my view, its the operating system that sucks. Also I don't trust it. I get the feeling I am being manipulated. Wow, I must be getting really touchy if the psychology is so strong that I was trying to ditch that menu as the first act. Oh Man! It even features that infantile kindergarten "My Computer" and unbelievably, "My Favourites" too. Yuk! "Home" has become "Home Personal Files" Sheesh - and this is in the root desktop! The gekko glows red, fading back to green when the mouse gets over it, and its creepy eyes follow the mouse at any range. That did it. I don't care if that kindergarten menu is a major contribution to mankind for computer navigation, unless I can change the icon, and the tab wordings, its getting ditched! Fortunately, one can have the "Classic KDE" selected easy enough.

3. Those first two points are not ones that anyone could fairly get critical over. Easy enough to get around, they don't really count. Wondering about whether I can have 3d acceleration on my Nvidia GForce4 MX400, I go for the configures. First thing I notice is something akin to those lying traffic management signs where they deliberately send you round some awful route. The "Configuration" becomes "Personal Settings" and "System Administration" is cut down to Log-in background preferences, Font installer, and Paths. The YAST shortcuts are elsewhere. So head for the spanner, just itching to click on SUSE's most useful feature - painless fetching and installing of the Nvidia driver that they cannot distribute on media. Go for "Hardware" Er.. Wot! The "Display" configure has now become "Graphics Card and Monitor" One can plink around in there looking for options till the cows come home, there is no route to decent opengl graphics. Have I got that wrong out of ignorance? Has Xorg found a way to work my Nvidia card in all its glory without bothering Nvidia? Anyways - the "Activate 3D Acceleration" button stays grayed out. Aw hell, do I really have to go through all that fetch Nvidia, install, get into all kinds of pain messing up xorg.conf, and not knowing whether that little 3D buttin will be clever enough to recognise what I have done?

4. Leaving video for later, it seems to be running OK. I notice zen-updater is there (that one pranged badly last time with 10.1). In fact, we have the boxes default checked for..
the yum box is not checked

Now thats a lot of somewhat overlapping updaters, and I am not sure I ever wanted zen-updater loose on my system again. First, selfish git that I am, I am all spoilt by the list of pre-set repositories that came with Ubuntu when I tried it. Mepis 6.0 (Ubuntu with the gloves off!) has Synaptic Package Manager. I am looking for YAST to show me the way to the favourite open-source software that is out there. Er.. well no. It is not going to do that. Its configured to look at the DVD only. The last time I tried the game that started with Google -> search for SUSE repositories (and variations of the theme) it ended badly with YAST and zen-updater hopelessly mangled if ever they saw a working internet connection.

So here I am with SUSE, hoping that it is back as the trusty powerful thing I had come to love. Sure - I will probably figure out all the new hurdles...eventually. This will not likely be enough for me to abandon the growing set of partitions of several other good distros. Debian seems to be at the root of much that is good, along with RedHat (Fedora).

GTrax, thanks for that update.

I too am hoping that Suse can be the one and only for me. But am currently stuck on 10.1 with many painful hardships in just getting the thing to do basic tasks. (simple display properties, refresh rates, resolutions, install firefox 2.0, getting yast to see known and good repositories, etc.)

I was hoping that 10.2 would actually bring some of these most important basics back to shipshape, but alas, I guess its not meant to be yet.

I personally am less disturbed by the windows influence over Suse, (actually, there could be some good things that might come of that, like reliable software installation and driver installation). But to have basics simply not working, I'm bummed, aggravated and plain let down.

I've had good luck with Fedora Core for 2 years now, and Fedora Core 6 is just plain good, albeit slow. It doesn't make many mistakes...at all.

Suse is faster, cleaner, more organized, and just a crisper experience, but it is wrestling me, fighting with me, arguing with me in circles (like my teenage daughters).....

Whats an egghead to do

Spare yourself the pain of any more with 10.1 Go to 10.2
For me, last stable SUSE was 9.3 boxed set with manuals and all the trimmings.OpenSUSE 10.0 (SLICK) and (SUPER) and ..well, I didn't understand what was happening around then. SUSE 10.1 was just broken, and we all discovered it.

The good news is the SUSE developers have made the difference. The 10.2 (alpha) has that "firm" feel as soon as you use it. I will not pretend that the presentation, and the constrained default choices suit me. They definitely do not, but such stuff is not the core of the thing, and can be configured away. Selfish, I admit, but if a distro was presented to me as a competent, clean, no-frills thing, with a Pandora's Box of various installable styles under suggestable pretty icons, and a clear set of tools to customize at will, where the tool itself came with context sensitive explanations, Ooooo..wah !

THE thing that burned me up with 10.1 was YAST. It seems that if YAST has spent ages downloading all the checked packages, and stumbles on one, then all is lost. A file "not found" or "failed checksum" or "server timed out", whatever. All the perfectly good downloaded packges will never see the "install" phase. In fact, you would be hard put to find them at all, and need to be a rockin' guru to recover them. It was such a basic thing that I still think I have to be wrong about how YAST works. I even posted about it - but.. there is a limit to how far I could chase the thing. Also, Zen whatever it is, had to be removed before I got even marginal functionality. If YUM was ever actually doing anything, I never found out. How long can you stare at it before you decide its waiting for something unspecified - or mabe pranged! ?

I have a set of partitions where is tried out SUSE, Mandriva, Fedora5, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Mepis 6.0, Zenwalk, Gentoo, Vector, Slax, DSL, and a Debian (Sarge) that I never succeeded in getting to run a graphical desktop. The distro of choice right now is Mepis 6.0. Since Mepis actually uses the Ubuntu engine, it comes with some (silly) constraints. You have to fight to get the Nvidia driver in. The media players are knobbled.etc. What do we all do? We immediately go out on the net, and find the ones that do work!

That said, its rock solid. You can log in as root, and do extended exploring and configuring graphically. The Ubuntu idea of using "sudo su" to have the right to use a terminal only for more than one command at a time is something I prefer not to do. KWrite, or Kate, or Gedit, or any number of good editors will do nicely thank you, and Konsole is quite fine for commands.

So - while SUSE gets to show its true self again, and until you decide you like the coming blend with Microsoft ethos, you could do worse than run Mepis 6.0 on the side. On my setup, the same bootloader has been running for ages, All I do is edit menu.lst every time I add a distro

I'll take your review and advice and try SuSE 10.2 Beta.

I had problems with YaST and the ZEN udpater in SuSE 10.1 and gave up. SuSE has a nice look and feel to it.

I have got SuSE 10.1 now running on 3 PC's
One Laptop and 2 PC's all different as night as day from each other.
I run DVD's, FF2.0, Gkrellm,KnetworkManager, ZMD, Yast, YOU, ATI 3D, GoogleEarth, Skype.......

And I am no rocket Scientist

Hi alfredh and others

It entirely reasonable that you succeeded. SUSE has always been built with a easy installer, but you have to set this against my ability to muck it up.

My first go at SUSE 10.1 seemed to go OK at first. But I am gifted in that the smallest weakness an any system will be found by something I do in a domino-effect chain of disasters! I have been working with various Linux systems, self-taught, for two years. You would have thought that that would have taught me enough to deal with scripts and initrd and anything ending in "rc", but I am still unable to easily go meddling with scripts like xorg.conf. Three times on two PCs did I tangle with SUSE 10.1. In the end, I gave up! I had much better success with SUSE 10.2 (alpha).
There may be a measure of luck that modifies our experiences with distros, and I'm glad it worked out for you.

For biased, politically incorrect, but still honest vitriol from a fella who has a BSc in Computer Science, try techiemoe's rants page..

"confessions of a linux addict"

There you can take your pick of his many "reviews" of all versions. Check out in particular his SUSE rants.
His "reviews" come with a warning. Distros are rated 0-4 "penguin ratings" with half-penguins allowed. Take it as it is. Stuff I say about distros are in the same vein. Its my experiences as a user, not as a programming expert!

I keep after SUSE because I need to control processes with truly consequential possibilities of damage and risk.I absolutely cannot entrust it to a Windows machine, Even then, the system has to work with external safeguards. I was impressed that SUSE 9.3 has run for months without missing a beat, and without a re-boot. Unsurprisingly, 10.1 experience bothered me some, but if you guys found it better, then my foray might have been blighted by "pilot error"

GTrax,

I had EXACTLY the same plan and experience with all the linux distros you've been using (except Mepis). I too could not get a graphic front end on Debian no matter what I did. I also could not deal with the sudo psychosis of Ubuntu and its cousins. I struggled with all of them, and then Suse 10.1 totally bummed me out. Lots o' problems including bad display issues, and absolutely NOT wanting Firefox 2 to be installed on it. My fave was getting a bad link stuck on the desktop with NO WAY of deleting it. Blah.....

Fedora Core 6 is the only thing that I could get to run reliably (only 6 reinstalls with that one, versus dozens with the others).

I'll try 10.2 based on your input and see what happens. I really want to stick with Suse, and I'll even pay for Novell support if the thing shows that it is reliable.

By the way, for those that don't know, Zen is Novells product that does system management, software distribution, etc. It is a well built product that existed in the Netware environment for years. Not sure what the Linux version does though. It might have become the internals for YaST.

By the way, IMHO, having microsoft and novell collaborate on Suse can only be a good thing. I'm not an evil empire kinda guy though (no conspiracies here ) Microsoft has nailed many of the things that the linux world has struggled with for many years and still continues to struggle with (software installation, drivers, display performance, speed, file system inconsistencies, application registration, file sharing, etc). I guess its what happens when you pay 10,000 developers lots of money to fix problems and bugs.

So in my dreams, Suse will get better, and more consistent with some more commercial influence. Just this one radio stations opinion

Mepis 6.0 has the Ubuntu engine, but it has done away with that insistence of never having a root user with his own graphical desktop and free-ranging ability.

You get to be root, and can happily make partitions, destroy other distros, load new packages, gleefully commenting out the most arrogant bits in scripts while you have screaming power trip with alsa sound MP3 at full blast to accompany your maniacal laughter... Its a bit like SUSE in that respect..

er Hmm.. Oops, sorry - I guess that was a bit OTT

I also am waiting for the final release of 10.2.
I started out with 10.0 which worked perfectly and then I migrated to 10.1.
I put 10.1 on 3 PCs and got 3 different results. 10.1 should have never been sold because it was not as good as 10.0.
I finally trashed 10.1 and went back to 10.0.

Hi slackass
My experience of 10.0 came from a Linux User magazine disc which billed it as "Open SUSE Slick". After the install, the menu.lst and splash screen called it "Open SUSE 10.0 (SUPER)" Clearly somebody was in there experimenting with superlatives in the hype, but this was when I appreciated that it was a "community" offering, somewhat different from SUSE 9.3 boxed set. I don't really know what was going on there at the time.

SUSE 10.0 ("SUPER" or whatever), just worked! The KDE desktop was clearly much faster, and I was feeling pleased - that is, until I started trying to install from SUSE site. Also, whole lumps of packages I know were there before were no longer in the list. 10.0 was OK, but it seemed friendless when it came to support.

10.0 had an incredibly short life until 10.1 came along. We all believe the "latest version" must have fixes and improvements, so I put in 10.1, and I discovered that there can be a worse beyond the already bad.

So far, with SUSE 10.2, it seems to have recovered its robust polished "just works" nature. I reserve judgement (for now) until I figure all the ins and outs of using all those YAST updaters. Sure, like most other users, I do system and security updates, but I am more interested in..
1. Being able to install software I need/want.
2. Remove software I don't want without breaking anything else that needs some of its dependencies
3. Be able to manage all types (RPMs debs etc.)

Do I need apt4suse? Will YAST no longer throw the baby out with the bathwater if some file on the end of umpteen updates has an out of date signiture, or the line goes down, or something? And what of Xen? Very attractive thing if you can get it to work..and it comes with SUSE 10.2. It also comes with Ubuntu, and no doubt other distros, but one, and only one, must run. I am going to give SUSE 10.2 every chance to please me. So far - I am still p***d off with having to get my Nvidia driver installed the hard way!

It's a chameleon isn't it? Not a gecko.

Yes - it's a chameleon.

From my personal knowledge of growing up in Africa, where such is feared and (because of its colour-changing ability and independent eyes) is regarded as unspeakable evil, I cannot see SUSE in any version being widely adopted there anytime soon.

Really? All I did with my Mepis 6.0 was:
Go to Synaptic and install nvidia-glx
followed by
# nvidia-glx-config enable
followed by a reboot

I am impressed. Does that mean installing nvidia-glx in effect fetches the same Nvidia driver as on the Nvidia site, and puts it in? I know there is a Nvidia driver known to xorg.conf as "nv", and I suspect there are more. My Nvidia install experience was more difficult, but ultimately successful, following instructions on the Nvidia website.

Not too sure, probably not. According to Synaptic it is a NVIDIA binary XFree86 4.x/X.Org driver, version 1.0.8762+2.6.15.11-5. The device section of my xorg.conf looks like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "nvidia"
BoardName "unknown"

and the beginning of glxinfo looks like this:

name of display: :0.0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation

How does that compare with yours?