Is SUSE10.1 really as bad as it seems?

[blackbelt_jones]

It was JeFro who told me that SUSE 10.1 was gettting a reputation as being plauged by bugs, and that many people were choosing to stick with 10.0. I'm a turning into a huge SUSE fan, and I thought I'd have try 10.1 for myself. It was slow, YAST kept crashng, and the dvd drive kept reading the data disk as an audiodisk. I went back to 10.0 almost immediately.

So I wondered what experiences other people have had. I've learned to not trust my own perception entirely, some times you just don't understand what you're doing wrong. It's hard to get the whole measure of an OS in a short time. You can find old threads in here in which I go to great length about hom much SUSE sucks... but please don't.


What are your experiences good and bad with SUSE 10.1. Could you give me a brief snapshot of your perceptions?

[cybertron]

I've just gotten done installing 10.1 x86_64 on 4 machines with 7 more to go, and there was a serious problem with the partitioner that destroyed the NTFS partitions that were on each of them. I ended up resorting to partitioning them ahead of time with a Knoppix CD. Other than that, the only problem I've had so far was with the automount when I tried to copy the CDs to an NFS share so I didn't have to do the disk swapping thing so much. For some reason it refused to recognize that I had inserted the last CD. I tried again the next day and it worked fine. Personally I've always found automounting to be a little flaky, so I'm not sure that's entirely Suse's fault.

So far I've set up a DNS server, NFS server and several shares, used Autoyast to install one of them and everything's worked just fine (except the aforementioned partitioner). I've used it for a couple of other things too that I can't talk about because they're probably considered confidential by my employer.

So as long as you're not concerned about any existing partitions (or have a handy system restore partition around - yay IBM/Lenovo!) in my experience you'd be fine. I haven't really dealt with the regular desktop software much though, so YMMV.

[crow2icedearth]

i had it installed for probably 15 minutes. i realized how slow it was running. There was no need for it to run that slow when i had hardly any process running . I dumped the install and install debian sarge with is much better in my opinion.

[blackbelt_jones]

i had it installed for probably 15 minutes. i realized how slow it was running. There was no need for it to run that slow when i had hardly any process running . I dumped the install and install debian sarge with is much better in my opinion.

That sounds a lot like my experience, except that I went back to SUSE10.0. The install took an awful long time, too. I installed from a DVD, and it took about 7 hours. It was an old machine, I checked some extra packages, but still... SEVEN HOURS?

[enshum]

I think there has been some in fighting at Novell about KDE and Gnome there is a faction that wants KDE dropped so Suse would only come with Gnome. I think the bickering effected the quality of this release. I sure hope they get things righted before 10.2 or 10.3 come out. If they drop KDE I will drop Suse period.

ed

[blackbelt_jones]

I've heard something about this, I think it was on Lug Radio, but the story I came away from was very different. It has to do with development, not with what desktop environments are actually included with the release. Novel is concentrating on Gnome Development because of limited resources, and financial ties with gnome... or something like that.

If releasing a SUSE without KDE at all, which would cost them practically nothing and has plenty of devotees in the Linux world, makes any kind of sense, someone will have to explain that to me. I know that Slackware dropped Gnome. I'm sure they had some purist ubergeek reason for that. Can anyone fill me in on THAT?

Personally, I've come to dislike the KDE desktop environment a great deal, and only use it when I have no choice (e.g., if I want to run a KDE-based live CD like Knoppix or Kanotix-) yet, I too might drop SUSE if they kept KDE out of a future release, because there are certain KDE-based applications I just can't live without, e.g, Konqueror, K3B, and -- when I'm using fluxbox (my new fave, at least with this old box I'm running now)-- kpager.

Can anybody settle this for us? what is the real story here?

My own hypothesis-- and that's all it is, and educated guess-- is that, after opening up the development of suse to the community, Novell may be having troubles managing the process, and that's led to a below-par release. Or is it such a bad release? It's true what someone said about ymmv... so Is there anyone who really likes SUSE10.1?

[cybertron]

That sounds a lot like my experience, except that I went back to SUSE10.0. The install took an awful long time, too. I installed from a DVD, and it took about 7 hours. It was an old machine, I checked some extra packages, but still... SEVEN HOURS?

That sounds like it failed to turn on DMA or something for the drive(s).

[happybunny]

regaurding suse and gnome:

My understanding is Novell now employee's the makers of gnome, so it was a no brainer to switch.

could be wrong, but thats what I understood when I was at a Suse Desktop 10 "class" last week.

[blackbelt_jones]

Yes, but I think that has to do with development and defaults etc. It's free software it costs them nothing to include it and it'll cost them users if they drop it entirely.

I guess I'll have to research this myself if I want a really definitive answer.

[enshum]

One of the things that keeps me with Suse is the fact that I can mix apps, utilities, multimedia etc from KDE and Gnome. I just go to control center-software mangement and find what I want and install it and it works. Of course this is with 10.0 which is stable as a huge rock on my machine.

ed

[dkeav]

novell does not employ the gnome team, they employ the ximian guys, miguel and friedman, although they are responsible for a lot of the enhancements to the gnome platform

[nikodell]

I have allways used SuSE now OpenSuSE
this 10.1 version I have tryed on at least 5 systems and have found it slow and unstable.

I am verry sad as i may have to move to a new distro but UBUNTU is looking to be a great distro -its x86_64 problems

[blackbelt_jones]

I have allways used SuSE now OpenSuSE
this 10.1 version I have tryed on at least 5 systems and have found it slow and unstable.

I am verry sad as i may have to move to a new distro but UBUNTU is looking to be a great distro -its x86_64 problems

Well, I am not a fan of Ubuntu and all that "sudo" business. I'm just going to stick with SUSE 10.0 and see if SUSE does better next time, and there's no reason to assume that they won't.

Consider Fedora Core. I used to be known (and am still occasionally teased) for a willingness to try every distro I could get my hands on, and I still like to have a look at some of the major distro releases. I've tried every Fedora release, and my experience suggests that Fedora has had some bad releases and some good releases. In fact, I have a little joke about that (except that so far it's been true for me, so it's not really a joke, YMMV). I tell people that so far, Fedora Core releases are like Star Trek Movies, the best are the ones with the even number. That's just how it breaks down for me. FC1 was kind of lackluster and dissapointing after running RedHat 9. FC3 was buggy, and I wasn't even able to get FC5 running on this machine, but FC2 and FC4 worked great for me-- fast, stable, and powerful. So, in my humble take-it-with-a-grain-of-salt opinion, Fedora is currently batting 400, and if the pattern holds true, FC6 will bring them back up to a solid 500.

Now, I haven't been running SUSE as long as I've been messing around with Fedora, but I'd say that based on my experience, SUSE is batting at least a 666, maybe a 750. To carry the baseball metaphor just a little farther, I'd be a fool to trade my star player, just because of a temporary slump.


Incidentally, last night I went into the #suse chat room at irc.freenode.org, and asked the same question. I got a smililar response (stick with 10.0) from some, but others told me that 10.1 can be salvaged by disabling certain resource-hungry applications or functions or something. I don't recall the details. By then, having spent an entire day installing SUSE 10.1, and two days installing and gradually setting up SUSE 10.0 again, I considered my own course fixed, and I wasn't much interested.

[nikodell]

sudo passwd

than you have a password for root login

and yes

10.0 is still good but i am still fighting 10.1 its random settings changing , i removed beagle and zmd and things are faster but still have the stability problems

[Piko]

SuSE 10.1 blew at first, but after a major patch of the package manager, it was solved. It's as good as all the others now except one big that I can't solve for the life of me. Joysticks aren't automatically given device nodes of /dev/input/js#, you have to fun Yast2->System->Detect Hardware to get the joysticks to activate. It's the only thing that drives me nuts right now. Other then that it's fine.