Well they seem to love it In other SuSE news, the free desktop version will now officially be called OpenSuSE. This includes all versions of SuSE for home users. The name SuSE is now reserved for Novell's enterprise products only. Effective from SuSE 10.2 Alpha 3
Great review. I didn't know about the switch to GNOME. For the first time, I am impressed with SuSE. I might even try it out someday.
Behind all that polish and gloss is a really unstable distribution. I can't speak for the enterprise products, but i've had a horrible time with SuSE 9.3/10.0/10.1. Okay, so I learned Linux through SuSE 9.3/10.0, and for that I am greatful. I suppose I could say it is a good platform to familiarise yourself with Linux. But as I started growing more aware of Linux, I also became more aware of SuSE inefficiences. Like the lack of decent repositories and the circular dependencies. And the fact that I could never successfully compile a program on SuSE. Upgrading from 10.0 to 10.1 broke my computer and I ended up installing a fresh copy of 10.1. And it was 10.1 that finally dragged me away from SuSE. I was put off by the fact that GNOME was now the default GUI. And it was quite obvious that all of the attention was put on GNOME. Hence why KDE looks exactly the same as it did in 10.0. I used SuSE exclusively for about 4 months. Mainly because I'd just taken a big step moving from Windows, and I really didn't want to have to take another step so soon; to a different Linux distribution. Now that i've moved to Kubuntu, i've realised that the switch between distributions isn't that great at all. Besides learning a different package manager, there's not much more to it (okay well there probably is, but not for a n00b like me ).
I have never personally used SuSE, but I have had nothing but problems with RPM based distros. I started out with mandrake 8.x or 9 (not a memerable experience) to try out linux and it was OK but not really impressed and couldn't install anything. RPMs were really bad, especially those stupid mandrake ones at the time (around 2001?). Thats why I never tried SuSE or Redcrap ..er Redhat. Its good to see Novel put such an effort into SuSE. Hopefully it only gets better. I have read several reviews that say that for the enterprise desktop, SuSE is the one and only. I believe it, but its not for me. True. Linux is linux at the core and you don't need to pledge allegiance to any one distro. The most important differences in distros are the package manager, installer, and admin/user utilities. Now that I'm on BSD its really not that different from linux from a user perspective, all the big differences are under the hood. I know I'm being really general here but what the hell, I'm making a point.
