Curiosity about SUSE

[Matthew Carpenter]

Hey Collins-

After Caldera's departure I dabbled with Mandrake and RH a bit, but kept pretty close to COL3.1.1 until my non-Linux buddy borrowed a bunch of Linux CD's from me and came back RAVING about SuSE 8.0 and went straight out and bought SuSE8.1 Pro.  My interest piqued, I installed 8.1 on a system and immediately bought 8.2 as soon as it was released. 
Hardware detection and config is great, software selection is amazing, and their attention to detail is unsurpassed in corporate distros (which says less than I wish).  They support WiFi out of the box (GUI Tools), provide good defaults (except that damned "locate" command needs to be hand-picked for install) and they focus on KDE instead of Gnome.  Their game selection is great and provides some enjoyment while showing off your Linux install to friends and family :)
YAST and SAX seem to be much improved over the older 6.x and 7.x days, and will tend not to viscerate your manual config changes, although YAST still doesn't like actually touching manually altered configs.  This is good enough for my use.  If it's a server I'm going to run Webmin most likely anyway, and the desktops are great for YAst2.  And Yast2 has both CLI and X-GUI and is fairly easy to use.

But that's just me.  Given all the changes in the Corporate Linux world I'd say all bets are off, with RedHat all but dumping the desktop (very Caldera-esque) and Novell attempting to prove they've lost the reverse-Midas touch, who knows.  Gentoo anyone?  How about Sourceror's Linux?  Or maybe straight Debian...  All I can say is this: I feel much more comfortable being in the Linux world as long as the Free-ks like Debian and "GNU/Linux" are around even if I don't hang my hat with them.  They are the best reason to hope that Corporate Distros don't kill Linux for all of us.  Why?  Because we always have another option not controlled by the almighty dollar, which forces somewhat of a balance.



On Wed, 3 Dec 2003 06:18:16 -0700
Collins Richey <erichey2 at comcast.net> wrote:

> After reading recent articles about Red Hat ("our current customer base isn't
> worth any support after 6 months") and Dell ("you've installed additional
> software packages on your PC? Sorry, we can't support you.", my curiosity is
> aroused about SUSE.
> 
> Has anyone used SUSE for its customers, or does anyone have any experience with
> SUSE as a support organization?
> 
> I've been generally impressed with the product, and I'm considering putting my
> money where my mouth is (first time since my initial Caldera installation!).
> 
> -- 
> Collins Richey - Denver Area
> if you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the 
> worries of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.
> 
> 
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-- 
Matthew Carpenter 
matt at eisgr.com                          http://www.eisgr.com/

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