[plug] SuSE Linux

[Derek Fountain]

> > Yes, it's relatively pricey, coming from Europe, and with a
> > company with a business model which might have them survive for a
> > while. You also pay for a really good and well maintained
> > distribution. When it comes to engineering - cars or software -
> > that Germanic attention to detail really makes their products
> > stand out as top quality.
>
> Far be it from me to dispell that illusion... it's mostly hype.

Um, which bit is hype? The pricey bit? The business model bit? The good 
distribution bit? Or the Germanic quality bit? Or all of it? ;o)

> SuSE deliberately aim their product at the "professional/hobbyist"
> so their product appears to be better than most other distributions
> that are aimed more at the "techo".

I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying it "appears to be better" 
but isn't? How have they achieved that?!

I like SuSE because their kernel has lots of recent patches, all well 
integrated and tested, KDE is well setup, and YaST is an excellent control 
centre. They have a graphical interface (or a text interface if you prefer 
that) to vast amounts of standard configuration jobs (second only to smitty 
under AIX in my experience) and they are right on the ball with patches and 
updates. They don't do stupid things like ship unofficial compiler versions, 
and they don't cripple the desktop for political ends.

SuSE is probably on the more technical side of the range of distros, but only 
just. For me it gets the balance right between trying to help and getting in 
the way of someone who knows what they're doing.

> As for pricing, I think it's not too far away from the other
> mainstream commercial distributions... Redhat RRPs are priced around
> the same as SuSE's for nominally-comparable products.

The difference being that you can pick up RHL for free from the 'net. You 
can't with SuSE.

> DVDs - two of, in packet, plus 5 CD. I assume that the 5 CD's
> contain the most-frequently-used stuff - and the DVDs contain plenty
> of other fruit.

Not quite. The 5 CDs and 1 DVD are basically the same: install the distro from 
whichever media you can use. The extra DVD is just for the sources. So, 
AFAIK, anyone should be able to copy the 5 CDs and have everything they need 
to make the distro run. No need to copy the DVDs unless you want the 
convenience and sources, respectively.

Of course, it ain't out yet, so I could be wrong. The beta code was shipped as 
5 CD ISO images, nothing more.

> BTW: If you're using SuSE and not running fou4s, you're likely
> wasting plenty of time and effort.
> 	http://fou4s.gaugusch.at/
> As well as being smaller and faster than YOU, once can "quarantine"
> specific packages against being updated automagically.
>
> But you have to get out your filthy text editor and change a config
> file! :-)

Well, whatever... As I say, I've no complaints, but you clearly have, and you 
also have a solution. So everyone's happy! :o)

-- 
"...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE 
...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, 
they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003