Nice review on Linux. I tried OpenSuse 10.00 the net install CD which is what they reccommend and the first thing it did was ask me to type in the IP address was for the server to download and install Suse. I did not know the number. It also asked me to type in the directory the stuff was stored at, and of course I did not know that either.

This information was not available in the manuals which I had read through before starting the install. Instead when I clicked on the link to show me the details I needed to know, I got a blank HTML page that said "The information on this page has been temporarily removed.".

Well, now that I read about the Suse commercial version, I'm interested, and how its much more gorgeous than Fedora. I thought Fedora was gorgeous. I'm tempted to buy the commercial version from amazon as you mentioned at such a reasonable price.

Fedora looked great on my sytem, but the updater, would keep putting alpha FC 5 stuff on my system, including alpha kernels, I don't mind, but chose core 4, not core 5 because I didn't want to take risks. I had one distro, that ate my entire hard drive for breakfast - IE It self-destructed. I must agree about the lack of options in FC 4. The default installation, did not offer screen savers, so if I want screensavers, I have to find them and download them. The system offered up an Nvidia driver, but it was not pre-compiled. The nice thing about being able to boot to a command prompt instead of a gui is that you can compile your nvidia driver. This driver will not install or compile if any Xorg based GUI is running.

The big hangup for me about Fedora 4 was that my backup software could not understand the partition info, and so tried to back up everything including empty space. This in spite that the partitions were Ext2, Swap and Ext3 which Ubuntu uses below and which my backup program has no trouble at all with. So I had to give FC up for now.

Currently I use Slackware 10.2, having finally gotten past all the fun and foo on the internet about how to compile the kernel and other stuff. Slack is great, and fun to hack at. The worry I have is that sometimes the upgrade packages can be a bit obstuse or make terrible descisions. My first package I tried, forgot it's name would download and install a package if there were any differences at all, even if it was a DOWNGRADE! The other hassle about Slackware, is that it doesn't create a regular user account for you, but just a root, and then you have to figure out what groups it must belong to and guess about how to edit the /etc/sudoers file so that you can do your installations. Many programs require installation by a regular user with temporary superuser priveleges via sudo. When I wasn't sure about what groups a proper non-root account should have, I started up XNnode, an IRC client and got a warning that said "Running IRC as root is stupid!!!" and then let me go ahead. Well, I guess its a chicken and egg situation, I get the choice of being called stupid for trying to run a program to find out how to avoid doing what it said was stupid. :/ LoL.

I have been trying to figure out slapt-get but the thing is a little strange acting. It is supposed to generate a list of packages and ask you if you want to install them, showing your version and the one in question, but I found two issues. It did not display to me what version I had installed, It said I had already installed packages I did not install, and the instant I said I did not want to upgrade a particular package it would exit with an abort message. I wanted to skip that package, not skip the entire process.

I also have Ubuntu 5.0 and its nice, kernel upgrades are as easy as a simple download and click the install button. This linux uses Gnome, and things are a bit hard to find but once you get the hang of it, its a piece of cake. Funny thing is it seems to notice my prefrences. It had at first installed a multi-cpu/multi-threading supporting kernel as one of the choices, but I removed it. Now it seems to know I'm not interested in SMT kernels, tho now, that I know it's for multithreading, than I might have wanted to try it.

Thanks for the fine read about Suse. I'm quite tempted to give it another whirl.

The evalution version of SUSE Linux is actually 100% the same as the commercial package, no difference at all.
The benefits of buying the commercial package is you 90 days of installation support from Novell, thick instruction manuals, 5 CDs and 2 DVDs full of stuff, that includes both a 32-bit and a 64-bit version of the operating system.

If you're comfortable downloading ISOs and burning CDs, you can go do that, but if you don't know how to do that, or you're on a dial-up connection or a really slow DSL connection, or simple want the support in case you run into problems doing stuff like a dual boot with Windows XP, you might want to buy the commercial package.

Nice article.

Really nice article.

I hope you are going to enjoy SUSE distro.

"The evalution version of SUSE Linux is actually 100% the same as the commercial package, no difference at all."

This is not true... there are several package differences. "Since OSS stands for Open Source Software, the OSS version does not contain closed source software." This was found to be true on my wife's laptop with the OSS version. It did NOT contain the wifi drivers needed for her system (which was silly since most other distros had it standard). The OSS website stated it was a seperate package that had to be downloaded... well, how, and by whom? She didn't have access to the internet at the time because she didn't have the wifi drivers! The retail set make sense over the OSS version. I'm stuck (happily) on Ubuntu 5.10 (year.month, stop truncating it people).

Great review overall (minus the factually incorrect comment which wasn't yours).;)

first of all i'd like to say great article... im a fan of suse myself and i think its one of the most user friendly linux distros. the last version i used was suse 9.3 n after readin this article will definitely try out v10.0
what i'd like to ask you is since your article said that the evaluation version is the same as the open source but someone also mentioned that the open source version doesnt have the closed source packages built in, why would anyone want to download the open source version. if both the distros are the same with the evaluation version having the advantage of closed source packages as well, would the evaluation version be the obvious choice?
i agree with you about the fact that fedora core 4 is crash prone. when i run kde on core 4 it would often crash especially after a fresh install. after updating the base packages and libraries however it would reduce. fedora is a good os too but definitely not as refined as suse. one advantage that fedora has over suse however is the fact that fedora is a lot peppier than suse.
you article was a great read and i look forward to some more articles like these.
cheers!

Garry: I'm glad you enjoyed the article. If you do decide to try SUSE, let me know what you think of it.

Troels: Yes, I'm inclined to think you're correct. The evaluation version of SUSE Linux that I downloaded seems to be complete—it appears to have all of the packages one could imagine, although it only comes with the 32-bit versions of things.

E@zyVG: Thanks for the linkage. I'm glad you liked the article.

Jeff: That's why I chose the evaluation version of the commercial install over the OSS openSUSE version. I don't view commercial software as necessarily evil and having the availability of drivers and such is an added bonus.

Synapse: Thanks, I agree. My experience with SUSE Linux so far is that it is very user friendly. I can see conceptually where having a completely open source system would have some philosophical advantage. But as a practical matter, having a few closed source packages mixed in helps the overall usability of the system. These included the Flash player, some drivers, the Microsoft standard web-fonts package, and a few other things that I think help to make Linux more friendly to the user.

Suse 10 is as close to xp usability as linux gets. for now anyway.

Neo: I disagree. I think SUSE Linux is more usable from day 1 than Windows XP because it includes a whole host of great software that are expensive add-ons in the Windows world.

SUSE is always an easiest distro avaliable. Basically between OSS version and commercial, there are no different except for some proprietary sofware and driver are not included in OSS. But it always not a downturn to get those run on OSS because it can be obtain from the internet. Nowadays, Linux is not a 'command line' anymore, eventhough it is a great advantage, which GUI now is most preferable. And most of it SUSE has proved it all, the easiest Linux desktop.

Thanks for the review Dan - I got back into Linux last year with a copy of Linspire which I hated and haven't tried again since.

Just curious but how does SUSE compare to your Mac? I am thinking about making the switch away from Windows all together - moving to a Mac for my laptop and SUSE or some other Linux flavor for my desktop....

Now - which do you prefer Mac or SUSE?

Yazid: Yes, SUSE is an easy Linux distro to use. Nice.

Hadleyro: Some Linux geeks have switched to Apple laptops with Mac OS X, and Mac OS X has certainly evolved into a full-featured operating system—having gotten better with each release. For consumer uses, Apple's iLife suite, which comes with new Macs these days, is an attractive proposition, and the freely available Xcode IDE put it on par. But I must admit there's something philosophically interesting about open source software, and Linux is the best platform for that. You might want to hold off on the Mac until Apple releases their Intel products in 2006, and then you could dual-boot the system with Mac OS X and Linux.

In my case the jury is still out on SUSE10. I have just installed it on top of a SUSE9 so as to get more 64bit compatibility in the packages without the hassle of downloads, builds etc. I got that, but also some problems -which I have not yet had time to sort out.

* Yast works fine, most settings were conserved in going from suse 9 to 10 but the bootprogram (GRUB)+ the startfiles changed so as to consistently boot into the command line.

From there, one may either do an init 5 to get to the graphics run-level or go into a file handler like MC to adjust matters. This would be quite unsettling for a new user unfamiliar with the shell.

* The second problem was that my canon 990i printer prints 25% of the page. Most CUPS printer programmes adress newer canon inkjets as if they were s800 and from the printer installation software this does so as well. Mine apparently does not like that.

* I gave the linux machine two disks which had bee used in a raid0 configuration (promise chip); no luck in re formatting with ext3 or anything else. In fairness to the formatting programmes it must be added that windows as well as partitionmagic(8) had trouble reformatting the disks as well.

* When installing language options the root user seems to be locked to american english even if specifically opening the option of root using other languages (which apparently has to be done in YAST, not in the desktop graphic interface)

* Finally; the Novell netsite is quite a bit more tedious to navigate than the old SUSE site. There may well be some magical portal somewhere, but I am reluctant to give any site more that three tries. When looking for the old style bug reports, lists of compatible hardware and corresponding updates under the Suse heading, one keeps being referred back to all kinds of other Novell products or out to external sites.

ph

Great article! I have been using SUSE for some time now and am very please with the way it has evolved. I have convinced my friend to switch to Linux and he is unsure about which distribution to use...of course, I suggested SUSE. I am about to print off you article and use it to help my attempt to persuade him. Thanks.

Thanks for the review.Have to say, after a tour of a number of distros in the last few months, that I was drawn to the "improvements" which seemed to be involved in Open SUSE 10.

What improvements? Well, 9.2 looked really nice but came without emacs for example and once it was installed "locate" got you nowhere because even findutils and the like were not part of the default install. As someone in another review summed it up, the 9 Suse series was as though someone quit halfway thru organizing the distro. It did have the clean, well lit look missing in most others. For that alone I often recommended it to newbs switching from windows...but most of my complaints were resolved with version 10, including the ultra corporate image that was offputting (tho not as bad as the Join the Club nonsense Mandriva has been up to.) Open? With all the missing apps I came to expect from other distros? And new stuff like Xen, and the excellent apt-rpm??! Suse has hit the nail on the head and I hope it will only get better.

If you find ubuntu too cute and small and fluffy (bongoes, gnome default, sudo instead of a root account, poor deb compatibility) and Fedora a headache (personally i never got sound from any FC install so headaches werent a problem) and slack or plain debian a bit offputting ( love slack but keep wondering when im gonna hose it ...when i did, i installed suse 10) you could do far worse than open SUSE. And now that Novell opened to a community, its up to the community to make it worth their while to continue offering so much value for so little. News accounts make it sound like Novell is hitting some rocky road with investors, the whole suse project, layoffs expected and more. I for one am willing to stand behind such an excellent product in the hopes that its just a rough transitionary phase. I could be wrong, but at least I dont see novell / suse doing a redhat and dumping its community in favor of enterprise. If anything its the opposite. Check out the Novell news pages, where it seems that RH is not seen to be as good of an investment choice as novell.

I can honestly say ive learned a lot even on distros i no longer like to use personally, but when i want a good looking desktop, plenty of "adult" documentation (some of the distros have that cloying ' isnt this easy!!' tone to their manuals) cutting edge apps with an entire corporation standing behind it, something for the new, and old linux user to use without slighting either...then its SUSE.

Paul: Good luck with the glitches you're experiencing. Certainly no system—whether Windows, Mac, or otherwise is free from them.

Cody: I hope things go well convincing your friend. I've certainly found SUSE Linux to be robust, easy to use, and stable.

J: Nicely put. I found on SUSE 10.0 that GCC wasn't installed by default. I went into YaST and installed that and a variety other packages. I think SUSE, more than any of the other Linux distros I've seen, balances the needs of the basic user with the needs of the power user. It suits a wide range.

Nice article overall, but I'm kind of a purist on the open source thing, so I'm going to get an OpenSUSE CD and try it out.

well i got suse finally today and i am gonna install it 1 hour... hopefully it good

I have been using SUSE 10 for approximately one week and I do like it. I haven't needed to boot into XP yet, ofcouse if I get the gaming urge I might at some point. Don't get me wrong, I do like XP Pro and Office 2003 but I am trying to see how possible it is to use Linux as an alternative. One thing I found is that if you setup Installation Sources and change these down the road you can confuse yourself and your system. Initially you get KDE 3.4 with SUSE 10 but if you want you can add the source to get 3.5 and upgrade. The problem here is that when there are security fixes you won't see them right away which to me that is not good. My advice, stick with the DVD Eval and only grab what you need ex.) libdvdcss etc... to get SUSE 10 on par with what XP. All in all I'm hooked on SUSE!

Any advice on how to get wireless working under SuSE 10.0 OSS with an atheros AR-5212 chip inside an IBM mini-PCI card?

I installed Fedora Core 4 as my first real attempt at Linux and just loved it. I could not believe what you can get for free. I upgraded my system to FC5 and was not as happy with it. I tried SUSE 10.1 OSS and like it so much I went out and bought a 160gb hard drive and the retail version of SUSE 10.1. Now I run SUSE 10.1 full time. I will use my windows hard drive for game...but that is all.

SUSE 10.1 can do everything I want it to and more. XGL looks great and it has a lot of functionality too.

I am new in the Linux world. I have had almot no problem with any aspect of SUSE 10.1 from installtion to networking. It was even very easy to install Nvidia drivers. Thank You.