Ububntu. Passes the "Old Grey Whistle Test"

[andycrofts]

Old Grey Whistle Test (OGWT)? Let me explain.
In Britain, our popular radio station once had a programme called the "Old Grey Whistle Test". The "Old Greys" were the concierges who stood at the doors of Broadcasting House. Old, in that they were about pensionable age, and "grey" because of the uniforms they wore.
What supposedly happened was that current tunes would be surrepticiously 'piped' to them at the door where they worked. If they were heard whistling the tune, the song had passed the Old Grey Whistle Test, and was deemed to be a success. (Wikipedia has a modification of this, but I got this explanation from a BBC Sound Engineer about 30 years ago)

This weekend, after a year, I got fed up with SuSE 10.2 (OK, 10, 10.1 (YUK!!) then '10.2). Finally got bored with over-complex configuration files ("why use a sentence when a paragraph will do" mentality), files in odd places, a lot of the support unintelligible to 93% of the planet (i.e., non- German speakers), and the likes of Zen, Beagle, Yast, and other programs that have decided, in their infinite wisdom that their need of 99% of system resources is vastly more important than my urgent need to quickly check e.g., my bus timetable, or transfer some money between bank accounts before I go to work.

Came to a head when my tolerably useable machine wouldn't load Firefox. Nice, bouncy cursor, hourglass in the status line, then....nothing. OK, reinstall Firefox (nothing intelligible in the logs, by the way).
Yast had gone the same way. That intolerably s l o w program (written, I'm sure in BASIC, or some other inefficient interpreted language) had finally croaked.
So, nothing to lose (all my home subdirectories, except /home/andy/ itself, are NFS'd onto another machine, because it's got a DVD burner). Reinstall the whole shebang.
Insert DVD, which had already been checked for md5 correctness and scanned satisfactorily many times, and away we go.

Not so! Yast throws an error, "can't find ... on media". OK, fair enough. When reinstalling from network, I got the options "OK", "Abort" or "Retry". Not this time with DVD install. I got "Abort", "Retry" Ignore".
Horror! "Retry" doesnt (at least the DVD light didn't flash) and both Abort and Ignore do exactly the same! Abort! Back to the beginning! Bye-bye partition setup! Tata to long software choices! Program in question was a US-English wordlist, for chrissake! Hardly of earth-shattering system importance. Retried a few times, failing on other sundry files with the same error. OK, my DVD or drive or both are up the swanee.

Sigh. Need a machine. Fortunately I'd downloaded a 7.04 Beta Ububntu CD some days before, intending it for a friend's simple requirement. I'd heard good things about it, so it was time to "eat my own dogfood".

In short, impressed! It's simple, uncomplicated, does what it says on the tin. (Apart from the dog*** brown-coloured desktop) there's nothing I don't like. My first foray into Debian-based, I love it. Didn't go for Debian before, because of the "Only Antique Kernels Welcome Here" philosophy. Stable?? Get a life! Live on the edge!

OK, sudo takes a bit of swallowing, but - and here's my point - for Granny, it works. As an equivalent, I can't find anything Vista Home Edition at €149 retail can do that this can't. (Apart from pick up a few free viruses and malware - included in the price!)

OGWT? Granny-test? Weekend of serious thrashing, it's the Muttz Nutz for me. "Real Linux"? My two servers (Print/Mail/Web/File/DHCP/NTP/MySQL/Samba/etc) can run happily with CentOS 4.4 in runlevel 3. This?
I like.
A lot.
And, this is a Beta??

Please note, this isn't by any means a Suse-bashing diatribe. Suse will be good, but IMHO it's trying to run before it can walk. It trips over its own shoelaces which, again IHMO are Apparmour, Zen, Yast and Beagle. Either they have no place on a desktop, or they're not ready yet - Yast in particular. But, that's my opinion. YMMV.

-Andy

(PS, it's also 'cool' to be able to pronounce the name, particularly in a thick African accent. Sounds - well - reassuring!
Never quite sure how to say "SuSE". Suuzi (As in Quattro)? Susse? Susi (wolf in Finnish) (Ess-Yew-Ess-Eye?

[blackbelt_jones]

Your experience is the mirror image of mine. I've had all kinds of annoying problems with Ubuntu, and SUSE works about as seamlessly as anything ever has for me. Don't know how to account for that, but I guess your mileage may vary.

One thing I can agree with. YAST is SLOW! Oh, heavens yes, at least when you've got it hooked up to the full array of online repositories. It doesn't bother me too much because I don't use YAST everyday. Also, the sheer comprehensiveness of YAST makes it a huge time saver for me. When I want the answer to an administrative problem, I know that I can most likely find the solution somewhere in YAST.

[ladoga]

Didn't go for Debian before, because of the "Only Antique Kernels Welcome Here" philosophy. Stable?? Get a life! Live on the edge!

I've seen this misconception often. Nothing forces one to use the stable release. (if you have a mission critical server stable would be a good choice)

You have the choice in debian. Either use some old stable and well tested software (stable) or bleeding edge (unstable). Or maybe something in between? (testing).

Ability to choose extreme stability - when needed - is hardly drawback.

If you're not happy with 2.6.18 kernel (that's what in testing now, no idea what unstable uses. probably the same), then you can always compile your own.