[CLUE-Tech] My 30-second SuSE 9.1 Review (err, whinge)

[Collins Richey]

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 23:47:38 -0600
"Jed S. Baer" <thag at frii.com> wrote:
[ snips ]

> The "promo" Novell disk set arrived recently, 
>
> After the install, the system booted fine, although I rather like
> seeing the various boot messages go by, as opposed to a graphical
> screen with nothing but a progress bar. 

It seems like every distro these days has to have the Windows look and
feel! On gentoo, you have to jump through hoops to get the bootsplash
and progress bar, and from the postings I read, lots of people are
jumping through the hoops. Go figure.

> User configuration ticked me off a bit. I attempted to create a group,
> and YAST complained about the group number I was using. Well, hey, I'm
> root. I can choose a group number, thank you. Given that I planned on
> mounting up the filesystems on my existing HDs, and using some of that
> stuff, I wanted to use the same user and group numbers as existed on
> my RH install.

This is one of my all-time biggest gripes. There should be a standard
for user and group numbering that all distros adhere to. IMO, this is
even more important than LSB!

> OK, time for the acid test. Can I get online? I use dialup networking.

> 
> Now with SuSE9.1, I can't even find a program
> to fire up the modem. This is something that has been pretty easy to
> get done in Windows since Win'95. It really disappoints me that it
> still isn't just as simple in a major Linux distribution. Yeah, there
> are all kinds of things that work well in Linux. But when an IT
> veteran such as myself, who's been using Linux for about 6 years or
> so, can't get a modem connection configured and running in under 15
> minutes, that's just nuts.
> 

Sigh, It seems that relatively few distros include a functional dialup
setup any more. I'm sure I would encounter some problems setting up a
modem on my own distro (others have, and for the past five years on
@home/ att/ comcast, I've forgotten everything I once knew about
modems.). The major difference with my own distro is: the user group is
so responsive that it only takes hours or days to get F-R-E-E help for
almost anything.

I'm sure you could get an answer from SUSE support in about a week, if
you qualify for support (heavy sarcasm here, since I'm not a real fan of
commercial distros and pay-for-support.).

All in all, SUSE's a pretty good distro.

-- 
 /\/\
( CR ) Collins Richey
 \/\/     fly Independence Air - they run Linux