21. Submitted by Anonymous, Monday 22nd January 2007

I'm tired of seeing reviews written by total noobs, or more accurately in this example, an opensuse review written by someone who doesn't really use opensuse. It's clear you are from the debian/ubuntu camp, taking some cheap shots at the rpm camp.

You admit you didn't bother an attempt to resolve a couple issues (notably samba browsing and updates). You don't bother to resolve the issues, but yet you continue to write a review, as if it's going to help anyone? You should at least resolve the issue before writing a review. If you had bothered to google either one of those issues, you would have found plenty of threads that address them. I guess you weren't interested in a useful review. You can't expect us to believe you wouldn't dig deeper if you had trouble installing the latest ubuntu?

Overall, your review covered more than other typical reviews, which doesn't say much. Most people only review their 'installation' experience, and give it a thumbs up if it finds all of their hardware, or a blistering thumbs down if it fails to detect something. I'll give you better than average here, because you talked to more than just the installation process. You could have gone further. How about a review setting up services, like say a samba server, with routing, squid, email, etc.? That would be a useful review, worthy of reading. If you are not into the server stuff, then how about setting up some typically end-user desktop stuff, like the evolution email client. or adding the desktop to an NT domain for authentication?

I'm glad to see you acknowledged YaST as one of the selling points for OpenSUSE, and you are correct. I wish you had more experience with YaST and could do it justice in a review. For example, with YaST, you can configure an LDAP server (yes I said LDAP), configure a Samba server, integrate user accounts (even Samba), manage the LDAP users, all within YaST! No command line. No ldif files. No add-on ldap tools. YaST is years ahead of other system management tools. YaST gives linux novices a realistic chance to actually do some useful things with their linux server, without making them visit the command line for even the simplist configurations.

You dare to compare opensuse's ease with Ubuntu? You kidding me? You have to do EVERYTHING in ubuntu from the command line. Stick to ldif files if you like, but don't say ubuntu is easier to use or configure than opensuse's yast. That just simply isn't true. The latest ubuntu requires you to manually install nvidia/ati drivers to get any graphics working. Routing, or any other services for that matter, require manual file configurations. No automated tools in ubuntu like yast. sudo apt-get install blahblahblah is nice to fetch a package, but afterwords, you are stuck reading tons of material to figure out how to manually configure any services. Simpler? Hardly.

I don't like the gnome new menu either... they need an option to turn it off, and go back to the original gnome menu system. If you had also installed the KDE system, you would have noticed it too has a new menu system. However, they give an option in the KDE menu to revert to normal. I wish they'd add that to gnome.

I could go on but I think I've made my point. I wish people writing these soo-called reviews spent more than just a few hours on it. A real review should take a week or two, or at least be written by somebody deeply familiar with the product.

I get the impression you are from the debian/unbuntu camp. The deb package camp and the rpm package camp have always debated who is better. Might as well have a Microsoft engineer try to write an honest review of linux. It just isn't going to be fair.

Stick to writing debian reviews, and leave the rpm world to the people who actually use it beyond a simple install.

22. Submitted by Mike, free-bees.co.uk, Monday 22nd January 2007

In response to #21:

Samba browsing and updates should just work out of the box, and there should be no need to search on Google. Considering Ubuntu's target users, then I would not dig particularly deep to try and fix the problem - no more so than with openSUSE.

As for my recommendation of Ubuntu over openSUSE, please note that in my conclusion that this was true IF you were not going to miss YaST. I believe that those who want similar functionality to YaST would be better served by PCLinuxOS, as I pointed out.

23. Submitted by Anonymous, Tuesday 23rd January 2007

It's really a kool distribution,
Please have a look at my desktop which is running OpenSuse 10.2 (http://linux-poison.blogspot.com/)

Thanks
Enjoy OpenSuse

24. Submitted by Anonymous, Monday 29th January 2007

Good review, and good points.

I'm an experienced Linux user and administrator, and just loaded a server with 10.2. Most of my servers are running 9.3 right now. The one thing that I miss is the option to do the installation in text mode (YaST). The machine I tried it on was a 450MHz Pentium III with 128 Mb RAM. As could be expected, the graphics were a *bit* slow...

25. Submitted by Anonymous, Tuesday 19th June 2007

I'm not sure why you had so many problems maybe it was specific to your machine or maybe you were just unlucky? I didn't have any of the problems you describe and it works fast enough for me in Gnome, although I do have some modern hardware.

I'm not so happy with YaST. It's slow and finding extra repo's was tiresome. I've tried Fedora 6 and Ubuntu before and this is by far the best distro I've tried yet. It's slick, smooth and very "professional" looking.

Ubuntu is probably the easiest to use, at least for a beginner. It's update facility is fast and easy to use and it's very well thought out for ease of use. Where it falls down however is that if you want to do something other than the very basic thats already installed you have to open Terminal and it gets very tiresome and I was never a fan of DOS and Linux's CLI is no better. With Suse however you can do almost everything from within the GUI. Ubuntu's desktop/GUI, well, I just don't like it Open SUSE's is vastly better .