Any SUSE defectors out there?
 

I am loathe to admit this but I am becoming disenchanted by SUSE since the release of 10.1. Is there anyone else out there with a simialr viewpoint and if so what distro have you 'defected' to? :confused:

I dropped SUSE at 9.something, after having used 3 or 4 versions. I found a new home at Slackware and never looked back. I see that you use Zenwalk which has a very similar philosophy as Slackware, so you probably have a feeling what I'm talking about.

I've just installed suse 10.1, and I'm kind of annoyed at some of the dumbing down since 9.1, (I ranted about one aspect of that in this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=461310 ), although I have also noticed some positive changes to suse as well.

But I've noticed far more changes to the 3rd party parts. KDE also seems to be getting dumbed down a bit, for example it seems even more insistant than before on using vague descriptions instead of program names in the K menu.

But even with 9.1 I was planning to switch to another distro, one that's faster. I just installed suse 10 as a temporary measure and backup, I've put it on a 5400 rpm drive(so I can't really tell how fast it is).

KDE 3.x has always had this behaviour and whether you saw this or not depended on your distros default configuration. You can change the default settings by right clicking your kicker (panel) -> configure panel -> menus -> kmenu.

SuSe 10.1 was the reason I became a Slackware user. Wish I had started with Slack much sooner; it's become my all-time favorite.

I left after 9.3 and found gentoo. I see that slack has been recommended; I have used both and they are both very great distros. I found slack installed more easily then gentoo but then gentoo was simpler to maintain and install software. Being as lazy as I am I went with gentoo. :) but both are very capable distros that teach you a lot. slackware's propaganda page has a way better selection then the artwork on gentoo.org I suppose artwork isn't the best thing to base distro choice on, but it is cool.

AFAIC there should always be a spare partition to try another distro.
I fool with everything in my sig and am liking Suse 10.1. Even fooled with XGL but it is flakey enough to prevent continued use.
The first question is really, do you need to learn to configure things the way you want or do you need to switch. Distro hopping is quite the chimera since easily 80% is all the same.
If you want to switch, why not do as I suggested. Load something else on another partition and try it.
Are you wanting more control? Try Debian or Slack.

Me too i stuck around really hoping the Yast2 Package management tool would be fixed alittle but it wasnt.

I like the Idea a Major force in Software Novell supporting Open Source Project but SuSe isnt what it was years ago.

Novell Please start from scratch RPM and Yast2 tool arent good enough.

I was am suffering problems left and installing software
so bad in fact i was 1 nanosecond from going back to mandriva.

Trying Ubuntu as a type.

Slackware and Gentoo are the two distros I hvae contemplated trying out. I have previously tried Mandrake (& Mandriva), Ubuntu and Fedora. Of all of them I thought that SUSE was the best. Although there is not much to choose between the top five distros I have always thought that SUSE somehow 'feels' better. At least it did until I upgraded to 10.1. Now it just seems so unstable, almost every time I boot into it there is some issue with it.

I like Zenwalk very much, it is very fast and very reliable but there are a couple of issues with it. Firstly it will not detect my digital camera and secondly setting up the network is a nightmare.

count me in, I used to purchase suse until the 9x series when they
decided to start mangling the sound subsystem (mp3s and so forth). I
decided to try debian variations and never looked back. Apt-get is
my friend, rpm is dependency hell.

Nowadays, I will try mepis and others like that anytime. Mandriva is
another one that went downhill.

I dont see only MP3 support a good excuse to change Distros.

I personally support the Major Distros choice to steer clear of products that breach DMCA and patents in order to still provide us with new Distro's.

I blame lawyers not Suse or Mandriva.

I've used suse10.1 a bit more now, and I'm increasingly looking to switch to something else. It has stability problems, and the package selection is quite poor. Suse 9 was more stable, even though I've slaped on a bunch of foreign packages onto it. And it won't even install rpm's the way it did normally, konqueror had them associated with xine or realplayer or something.

Well I have finally decided enough is enough and ditched SUSE. It is just not fun anymore. Last night I overwrote it with Zenwalk 2.8 and I am SO glad I did! It is stable and runs so fast it is untrue.

The whole process of downloading the ISO, burning the CD and installation took under an hour (incredible but true!). That really shows that SUSE has become the Bernard Manning of Linux distros.

I find 10.1 is vastly superior to 10.0 in most ways, here are some highlights:

• Samba works out of the box - can even join a domain now without having to go to a shell prompt
• Evolution Connector for Exchange talks to Exchange out of the box (shame we migrated way from Exchange now that Novell FINALLY fixed Evolution!)
• YUM ('nuff said! Yes, 10.0 offered it, but it broke the system more than it helped)
• XGL (too bad in my machine I still use ATI cards. Ugh.)
• KDE-Samba integration works out of the box (WOOHOO!)
• PHP5
• Beagle works rather well!
• SCSI works much better (on one machine with 10.0 I had a SCSI scanner ghosted 7 times, I replaced cables, installed active terminators, changed the SCSI ID, etc. etc. and tried the internal SCSI bus all to no avail, upgraded the kernel, and even reinstalled just to rule out ID-10T/PEBCAK issues. No dice. 10.1 worked perfectly out of the box.)

What I dislike:

• The smart packager (I like YaST's package manager's search and hierarchical browse features)
• Software Updater (zmd?) - updates either refuse to apply, or if I do apply them, it still claims that updates are available. Novell seems to have not tested this at all, much like 10.0's samba packages were totally broken and obviously untested.
• YOU performance (I finally hit the issues many others reported, on an older machine. The issues are unnoticeable on newer Pentium 4 machines)
• "installation-sources -a" is gone. What replaced it?
• NO FOOBILLIARD?

That is an improvement and brings it on a par with Windows 98. If I used SUSE on a network I would probably find that very useful.

If I had an exchange server at home that would be useful!

How is it Zenwalk seems to manage with only one package manager?
Don't worry, if my experience is anything to go by it doesn't work with nVidia cards either!

If you say so!
Ok?
Damned with faint praise indeed!
Now you are talking! That certainly IS a big improvement, I also had SATA problems with 10.0.

Maybe I was wrong to ditch SUSE? :confused: Perhaps a boot-up time twice as slow as XP and a performance like a senile slug is a small price to pay for a distro that can handle these new fangled, 20th century SATA hard drives and has a desktop search tool that "works rather well"! :rolleyes:

Do yourself a favour, try Zenwalk!