there, i said it.

the next time yast tries to install anything without showing me upwards of 100 dependancies it can't take care of, i'll consider it again.

is there ANY reason to EVER choose yast over an apt-based solution?

and yes i realize i wrote 'it' instead of 'is' in the title up there....hehe.

Yast is default but there are plenty of other options, you can use whatever you wish. I think yast (package manager part) in 10.1 is incredibly bad and is possibly going to give suse a bad name.
Personally I used the buginess in yast as an opportunity to try out smart and was pleasanlty suprised...

but does the problem go deeper than yast? because whenever i download an rpm file, i can't install it for the LIFE of me using the command line, and i know how to use them with -Uvh and everything, i used to use an older version of suse and i got along just fine with it, but now whenever i try to install one via command line it doesnt work.

when i try to use the graphical rpm installer, zen installer i think its called, it takes honestly 2 minutes just to open it, and another 5 to install the package. (though it gets it done).

Is suse 10.1 honestly this bad?

Because I got xgl/compiz working, which is cool and all... but even the downsides of doing that make it not worth it at all. (in remote administration windows have no borders, opengl programs dont work properly, most 2d games have transparency issues)

I've only been looking around the forums today bbut it seems since the 10.1 release lots of problems are being reported with the updater and yast. I have installed a few rpms through the command line and not had any problems though. Did you do a default install or custom one? A dependency may have been removed.

I'm not having any other problems with 10.1 at all other than yast, sax and gnome issues but I had identical issues with 10.0.

i started with a default install, and i didnt go far enough as to select all the packages i want individually, but i did add whole sections like games, network administration stuff, development tools (you know how you can select whole categories)

my yast is showing dependancy problems for things completely unrelated. say i try to install yum, it shows me honestly every single package related to package managers. It even says it conflicts with the zen installer.

Im no expert but i know you can have more than one package manager installed, or at least more than one program that uses the damn word package in it.

10.1 is honestly useless

You could always use an alternative package manager.

There are many out there that all do a great job at replacing YaST2, even one from SUSE/Novell directly, y2pmsh.

The new YaST2 does have some issues that need to be worked out, till they are I suggest just using something else. Other then package management, SUSE 10.1 is a kick ass release.

Here's a link to a short HOWTO for y2pmsh:
SUSE 10.1 Package Management Workaround.

I personally only recommend what Novell/SUSE officially supports and distributes with their media...But smart, rug, and a few others work well also.