It works very well, you need to run the tiny-nvidia-installer script to pull down the drivers. In fact I just installed 10.1 on one of our NVidia-equipped boxes (we've gradually been dumping ATI hardware) and the script took a while to pull down the drivers and kernel module wrapper but it worked flawlessly.

As if it wasn't bad enough that the nvidia driver wouldn't install through yast online update anymore, now an update removed my nvidia driver.

I use KDE! I have uninstalled most of Gnome, all the MONO, sharp, zmd, rug, libzypp etc. I use SMART.

I moving to Kubuntu soon...

I have SUSE 10 on my laptop, but I'm seriously thinking Debian or Slackware because it's as slow as a snail (probably I'm insulting the snail ) and it enforces the user to do everything its own way (through YaST) which takes ages to load.

SUSE looks and feels nice for a while until you start hitting the rough patches. As long as everything works out of the box it's a great distro, but once you find that "X" hardware or software is not working as it should, it's well nigh impossible to get the stubborn YaST to configure it the way you want it. I've had endless frustration with YaST both for hardware and software management. Sometimes it's a matter of not detecting the hardware. Sometimes when the hardware is detected, it refuses to let you configure it properly. I've still not been able to configure the internal modem (although I don't use it much, it's useful if you are away and have only a telephone line to connect to the internet).

That being said though, it's a very usable distro if you just use it and don't tweak too much with it.

I must say Suse is just getting old for me. However, I tried to install Debian last night on my duel booting laptop. BAD IDEA. When Debian wrote to the MBR it corrupted the windoze section. I had to reinstall, I was ok cus I had knoppix. So I have to say that I like Suse for the easy installer and the nice helpful relaxing gui durning install. I know, that is not what debian is going for. I will say that I really dislike the live CD by suse as it doesn't let me write to any drive, not ext2 not fat, nothing. Maybe i did something wrong.
I will say that I have Suse on 4 servers at the lab and they work very nicely day in day out. There has been some issues with overthrollting of the CPU while idle due to powersave junk.
I'm however thinking about going to Gentoo. It looks cool and I think i'll have fun.
I'll probably put Gentoo on my new cluster system as well but I don't know yet.

I am newbie and found suse 10.0 to work well but 10.1 was to buggy for me so I went back to 10.0. I think it is a good learning distribution for me and when I have learned linux well enough I may change but now I just hope 10.2 is a solid release. I need to learn the basics well before distro hopping
Stan

I'm Back to SuSe

The product support is just too good,
Documentation Software availality and stability since recent updates in 2nd to none

I ran Ubuntu for 4 weeks on two computers and it was good/bad
most noteable was the update that rendered my X system screwed (i wasnt the only one http://jaebird.wordpress.com/2006/08...-xorg-warning/)

Since installing SuSe 10.1 again i have been very please especially with a challenging product like a laptop. Everything including Modem IR Speedstep Battery monitor work straight away in SuSe
Ubuntu not so.

Oh and Novell made a nice stable XGL available on the disk
and concise howto
I'm using XGL kiba-dock and compriz now and its great.

For those of you interested in trying Gentoo and/or using XGL:

Check out SabayonLinux! I just recently switched from SuSe 10.1. I'm very impressed by Portage, and all I had to do to get XGL working was use "sabayon xgl" as my boot options when booting, and use a nice simple installer. It got my hardware graphics acceleration out of the box and everything. Note that this is a packed LiveDVD. If you're interested in a smaller install, you might download the LiveDVD to poke around and wait for the SabayonLinux 3.0b miniEdition to actually install.

PS: I can't post a link to the SabayonLinux website what with this being my first post, but it's an organization, and the URL is very obvious.

Started with 8.0 and then 8.2 was my last SuSE - I think that was the best one for me. Used it till eol and then a bit beyond as my server. Went to slack as my desktop. Tried SuSE 10.0 later and it had changed alot - I'll leave it at that. I only use slack now. I don't have time to learn another distro.

I've now removed SUSE 10 from my laptop and installed Debian Etch.

You just needed to re-add the Windows boot menu option in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file once you boot into Debian.

I chose Suse 10.1 because I didn't know how well other distro's would be able to partition my windows drive. I could not afford to lose my Windows partition under any circumstance because setting up internal winmodems requires being able to download the driver source code and build it, if your modem is supported. Now without a working modem, I have no way except through Windows, to get internet and modem set up.

Suse 10.1 does seem to take a long time to load the start up screen. In failsafe mode, it says, Warning: DMA on your harddrive is not turned off (or on?) and fsck will be very slow. I have no clue what this means or how to change it, but all I know is that Suse 10.1 takes about 3 minutes or longer to load whereas my preinstalled Windows XP home edition takes less than about 30 seconds. I want to enable 3-D support so I can try XMoto and other free 3-D games, but I have an ATI Radeon X200 and that card isn't properly supported. I couldn't even get the login screen to not be scrambled and unusable until I typed "sax2-vesa" at failsafe mode. It took me a day to figure that command out just by messing around at the command line. But other than those issues it seems like an ok Linux distro. I don't expect it to be entirely like Windows -- that is -- easy to use and so unstable as to require a reinstallation every other week.

I've had very mixed feelings about OpenSuSE v10.1. The one thing that I like about it is that it runs very very fast, now that I've fixed the graphic driver problem. First I want to talk about what I like about OpenSuSE.

First and foremost is the encryption. SuSE has always had lots of encryption options that are not available on other distros. Sometimes I think that SuSE must have almost every encryption algorithm in the world available. That's really really important to me.

Second, as I mentioned above, the speed is amazing now that I fixed the graphic driver problem. I suspect that the speed is the result of the new kernel, not anything specific to SuSE, but I don't really know.

Third, it has everything that you might want to learn about already installed and ready to configure. Whether you want to run Samba client or server, LDAP, DNS server, DHCP server, MTA server, NFS server or client, NTP server, and just about anything else that you need to learn. It's all under one roof.

But I came here not to praise Ceasar, I mean SuSE, but to bury it. I've got plenty of complaints.

Out of the box the graphics were unbelievably slow. I fixed it by installing the wrong version of ATI drivers. First I tried installing the correct version of the ATI drivers but the darned thing didn't even run X. I just got the black screen that so many people have talked about here in these forums. So I coincidentally had an older version of the ATI v8.21.7 drivers for XFree86 v4.4. We know that SuSE v10.1 comes with Xorg v6.4. So this was definitely the wrong driver. I installed it anyway. It worked, more or less. I don't have OpenGL, but that's okay. I have always configured my machine to boot into run level 3. Once I log in and execute startx the KDE environment is running within five seconds. Really. I kid you not. By the way this version of the ATI drivers is still available at the ATI web site.

My USB appears to be incapacitated by my USB mouse. Ever since I started using a USB mouse I cannot use any other USB device at the same time. My external backup hard disk is connected via the Firewire interface on my ATI Radeon 8500 card. It won't work if I plug it into a USB interface.

YaST won't install new software from CDs. This seems to be a problem that has been around for a few versions but I think I didn't see it before because I only recently started using external USB/Firewire disks and a USB mouse. I installed SuSE with the external disk attached. If I read the OpenSuSE forum correctly this caused the SuSE installation to misconfigure my installation device, and I can't fix it. I've looked for the YaST configuration files for hours. Can't find the one that defines the installation device.

SuSE won't run boinc software. I mentioned this in another post. Boinc is software to run various distributed computing projects like SETI@home et.al. The software starts okay but within the hour it will freeze the entire system. I have to reset or power cycle the computer to get it working again.

SuSE comes out of the box with IPv6 built in and enabled. I can't find a way to disable it. The IPv6 modules are built into the kernel. I've tried recompiling but so far no luck. I think I have to create a new initrd to go with my new kernel. IPv6 simply adds noise to the Internet. Nobody should be using it. I've used Ethereal to watch my packets. The AAAA queries are never successful. IPv6 should not be enabled by default.

We all know about the libdvdcss issue. Other distros are also missing this capability. I can see it being left out of the free version of SuSE, but if you purchase SuSE then it should include the capabilities that you get with Windows Media Player. If Microsoft can do it then the Linux commercial distros can do it.

That's all that I can think of at the moment.

I came from the AT&T Unix / BSD Unix enviroment. I have been running SUSE since version 5 and 10.1 is just too much to ask me to put up with.

I am getting the impression that Novell is trying to dumb down the system so you will need Certified Novell Engineers to fix it.

I would like to work on my computers and not spend the day tweaking them to run properly.

I am currently researching other distro's Ubuntu, Zenworks, Slackware, Fedora

I am not a fan of Red Hat and there spin offs.

I am following this thread and suggestion will be considered.

Michael

If you haven't tried it yet, I would recommend you try Zenwalk's live CD.

The biggest problem I had with Zenwalk is its use of LILO instead of Grub, so multibooting takes a little work. Even though I like KDE, Zenwalk uses XFCE by default - which has the look and feel of Gnome - but it is efficient and very functional after installation.

Compared to SUSE, it's blindingly fast and I'm having fun with it. The only major problem is printing in black only with a multifunction printer. In time, I'm sure this can be solved, if only by buying a basic black text printer.

I started using SUSE 9.3 a year ago, didn't upgrade to 10.0 but did manage to get 10.1 working decently with Smart as a package manager and a gutted Beagle. I got rid of it entirely only last week and replaced it with Zenwalk, in preparation for Slackware 11.0, which is due any time.

This is a good thread. Very interesting.
I have no intention of changing to another version of Suse, so I suppose I am a potential defector.

I started as a Linux user last year and used Suse 9.1 because somebody gave me the disks, and I had the impression that some of the "dumbed down" aspects of KDE were exctly what I needed as a newbie. I was very grateful that nearly everything worked out of the box, because I could not afford any hold-ups for my work.
On the other hand maybe Suse does not deserve too much credit for this: both Knoppix and Mophix live CDs pretty much performed the same as Suse at hardware and network detection.
I do find that Yast can be a helper one day and be an obstacle the next.

I have come to hate Gnome and Kde desktops a lot: Gnome lacks features and configurability (I know it doesn't really -- but what a mission!) while Kde has loads of features if you don't mind it crashing a lot. I use IceWM almost all the time, but totally rely on Konq also -- there is no way I will choose to type when I could just click.

I would love a system that runs faster than Suse, after all Windows ME ran like a scalded cat on this box, Suse is like a slug.
But if I change -- to what?
I have made a huge investment of time to get some things to work in Suse -- e,g, mplayer, mplayerplugin, nvidia driver, hylafax, cinelerra, xinerama, SB Audgigy sound card -- will I need to do it all over again if I change??