Just want to add my observations on Suse 9.3.
I've been using SUSE since 9.0 and had 9.0. 9.1 and 9.2 and I have to say that 9.3 is the best by a long way. KDE is so nice now in v3.4 and suse 9.3 is noticably faster than the other previous Suse variants. I was loath to upgrade to 9.3 since i had 9.2 just the way I wnated, but I'm very glad I did. If you can,I would urge you to upgrade.

Cheers!!!
Ludwig

Hopefully, the new Novell/SUSE partnership wil continue to develop and blossum so that things will only get better and more powerful with each new release. I've been using my new 9.3 distro for a couple of weeks now, and things are coming along nicely.

As far as I am concerned, the ONLY thing that can stop the tremendous momentum and growing popularity of Linux is the usual F.U.D. and political arm-twisting and payoffs that have become SOP with the folks in Redmond. Both Linux and the rest of the Open Source movement have the potential to, once again, make computing and computer software "fun" once again. After all, computers and software should be highly effective tools for USERS, not just another manipulative excuse for a financial MONOPOLY.

Rock on, Linux Penguins! :-))

Faster? No. Except that you never optimized 9.2. Speed is exactly the same.
Bad in 9.3:
- dynamic device creations based on the medium name prevents installation of multi cd software (stupid idea)
- slower media reading (see above)
- even less support for multimedia in the boxed version
- stability unknown yet

At least until now I would say that 9.2 was slightly better.

I actually spent days optimising various things in 9.2 and 9.3 is faster right out of the box than 9.2 on my system!

Out of curiosity, what did you optimise? Because I seriously doubt that 9.3 can be faster.
"Days optimising" that is no good.

Hi,
I made a lean and fast 2.6.11 kernel, cut down out uneeded services preloaded instances of certain apps that I run a lot, optimised the order and settings of certain partitions,tuned IDE performance, updated KDE to 3.4 ,updated software,tightened scripts under /etc/rc.d/ and quite a few other things ......

Despite all this, 9.3 was faster out of the box than 9.2 with all these tweaks.

Cheers
Ludwig

well I had 2.6.11.8 (1.2MB size), Xorg 6.8.2, KDE 3.4 and minimum services starting. I don't see any differences. It should not be in fact because none of possible speedups are added to SuSE 9.3 (like gcc4 and gcc4 compiled KDE, or ReiserFS4 and so on).

well, it's a lot faster for me

I never used 9.3 'cause i found 9.2 was such a pain in the ass that I now use gentoo.

SuSE 9.3 is the only Linux distro I have ever used in my life, and I do have to say that it is really good. I don't know how the other versions were, but I know this one is great.

The only problem I have is it taking forever to read CDs, or not read them at all, which sucks

thats subfs one of the reasons i changed distros

I've used both and find 9.3 to be a big improvement. All comes down to hardware and personal preference in the end though..

I jumped Suse with 9.2 and should say that i like 9.3 much better than 9.2
Everything but multimedia goes better out-of-the-box (at least for me and 2 or 3 other computers in which i saw the difference). I just would say that OpenOffice 2.0 pre doesn't run like previous stable versions. I think Novell should stay with 1.1.4 'till 2.0 final comes out.

"
Hopefully, the new Novell/SUSE partnership wil continue to develop and blossum so that things will only get better and more powerful with each new release. I've been using my new 9.3 distro for a couple of weeks now, and things are coming along nicely.
"

There is no partnership. Novell completely owns SUSE. They bought the company outright.

I dunno, I do not worry about its speed as much as I do for stability (I have a decent hardware - P4/512Mb RAM - so it must runs well enough the 9.3)

what the SuSE guy's must do to improve speed/stability/usability/compatibility (for the moment as far as I used SuSE 9.3) :
- add in YaST native support for apt4rpm (to not be forced to use thinkgs like Synaptic, Kynaptc, etc.);
- patch the 2.6.11-7 kernel to support my bloody soundcard, SB Live! 24bit;
- add NPTL kernel (Native POSIX Thread Library, as Slackware does in the curent tree);
- add ReiserFS 4 as install option too;
- add a REAL theme manager for KDE (not killing thongs like : you have to restart KDE when you change the mouse pointer theme!) with apropriate tools;

cheers