As with the last version, the live CD will not install. On rebooting, I was left with a CLI which refused to accept my passwords. I know that it installs from the DVD, but how can one trust a distro that produces any version that is unusable?

The live CD revealed that the problems with media codecs are still present. Attempting to play an mp4 led to the statement that no codec was available, while trying an flv resulted in SUSE attempting to install everything from unrar to mailmerge. The website is less than helpful here, but one eventually finds that 5 repositories are involved. Clearly one of them has problems with setting dependencies.

I have been a die-hard suse fan since 8.9 or something. I loved 10.0 and expected something at least close to that quality in 11.x, do I have downloaded and installed 11.0, 11.1, 11.3, and finally when 11.4 was "finalized" and they started working on 12, I thought for sure this one will work.

Some of the problems seem to be oversights in kde, such as how to handle a superuser that does a kdesu.

But how the developers themselves hadn't noticed things like these, I just can't fathom. Is even one package compiled on the system they are building?

http://rainbowsally.net/pub/bash-n-crash.png

It's easy to work around this but it should never have happened.

Here's one where the pixels on a desktop got scrambled when I changed from a normal user to superuser using the Alt-Ctrl F7 and F8 buttons.

Nothing illegal about doing that, but look what happened to my ROOT Desktop. (This is the "finalized" 11.4).

http://rainbowsally.net/pub/cdab-pixel-mixup.png

My root desktop. 11.3 had the same problem but even worse. You couldn't even read the menus when this happened.

Here's another crash on the commandline in which dr konqi also crashes -- no bug report gets sent.

http://rainbowsally.net/pub/su_kdesu-kate.png

And no developer noticed.

export $(dbus-launch) does in deed fix this problem (only if "$HOME" == "/root", though), and when I was a member of the suse forums (an account dating back to 2005) I mentioned this and it was suggested that this is normal by long-time suse users, and I can see how after a number of years of working around this stuff it MIGHT SEEM normal, but let's face it.

That doesn't look right. Even dr. konqi crashed.

I should have come here before committing to suse 11.4, which I now somehow have to back out of. I see the rating here is a rock solid 1.0 (the lowest possible), and for reasons such as the above and many others, I concur absolutely.

The SuSE development philosophy is top-down, irresponsive, unenlightened, and possibly even lazy.

RPMs are great. Binary compatibility is great.

But if you don't even use the system you are developing, how in the world are you going to fix the little things such as docs for updatedb which are wrong; updatedbg doesn't look at "PRUNEPATHS" variable. Whether it's a bug or not, I don't know, but those little things would be noticed if you used the thing you are developing.

And how are you going to notice the big things that don't get bug-reported because they blow up the bug reporter (dr. konqi).

In all, I'm very very disappointed in my once-favorite distro.