so i installed suse 10.1 on a desktop system here at the house. it's a pIII 1GHz system with 312MB of ram. nothing special. i donwloaded the cd's via bittorrent because t. uses suse at home and likes to install from cd.
the installer seems to have gotten more complex with more buttons and options and not everything is exactly sensicle. but it's 'just' the installer, not something that's overly critical. it is too bad that they started with such a lead in the installer area some years ago but haven't kept improving things. they've made changes, but that's different than improvements. over all it's not all that much different than 10.0 or even 9.x really.
i do like how they now offer a bunch of non-Free stuff like flashplayer and opera on an extra cd now. using it with the installation process is a little less than intuitive and takes more steps than it really should, but it does work and saves time from having to add those things later. certainly an improvement and all distros should do something like this IMHO. ++cool.
after the install, the bootloader screen looks beautiful. the boot process itself is ugly though; for some reason the install didn't give me a nice graphical boot but an old school text mode thing. i noticed that it still installs and turns on things like postfix as well, which shows their emphasis on the server rather than the desktop. the login manager is very attractive as is the desktop splash.
and boy does kde come up quickly. lubus' boot improvement patches are in this version it seems (no surprise: he works for novell) and kde 3.5 is up and usable in ~4 seconds on the machine. impressive!
unfortunately the fonts suck, the sound card wasn't set up automatically, the default display resolution was rather low (800x600, with not higher options available in krandrtray either; will need to do some manual tweaking here), a power management utility was loaded by default in the systray and the patch updater GUI is quite slow and looks foreign. yast is still slow. the "my computer" links brings up all kinds of information i don't care about (do i really care that the floppy filesystem is "auto" or that / is reisferfs?), though it does look really pretty =) would be nice if it didn't move to the top of the page every time it refreshes, but that's really more of an issue with konqi not providing a rich content view for these kinds of things. and then at one point the monitor just went black and wouldn't come back on so i had to reboot.
the overwhelming majority of problems i've run into in the first few hours of having it on my machine aren't KDE related but have had to do with software lower in the stack.
so i'm not quite sure what to think. lots of really good moves can be seen in suse 10.1, but also lots of rough edges. is this the result of Novell's focus shifting and figuring out how to do this linux thing? it seems that while lots of work is going into the server side of things, which is understandable given where sales are likely coming from for them, the desktop seems to be languishing. i'd be more than happy running SUSE 10 on a server given the software it comes with and YAST's great configuration tools for those tasks, but i'm not sure i could say the same for the desktop. Novell is focusing on the enterprise, but i just don't see that focus outside of the server offerings.
we'll see how it settles in over the next week or two, but so far i don't think it will be tempting me away from the laptop much.
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22 comments:
What distro does a KDE developer use for every day use :-P ? I'm curious.
It is interesting to hear peoples experiences with different distros. I too just installed SuSE 10.1 and it is honestly the first distro I have encountered in 10yrs. of Linux use where everything worked flawlessly on the system I was installing it to. I'm sure the system has bugs because all do, but in 18 hrs of clicking on everything I can find and testing every program installed (and I installed a very large number beyond the default) I haven't run into anything yet. Now, I know that my experience is probably abnormal and sounds even like a bit of PR trolling for Novell, so let me say that the most recent Flight CD from Kubuntu was nearly perfect on my system and only seemed to drop the ball when setting up Universe and Multiverse access the first 3 of 4 attempts (but eventually started working - some network issue not on my end). The reason I bring up these examples is because my wife has a Mac running 10.4.6 and people I work with are running WinXP and these two distros have even convinced them that desktop Linux is a reality if you want it, and that you really can't blame technological reasons but rather have to blame social reasons for its adoption rate. A big thank you to all the developers and contributors in the community and at Linux vendors for this awesome solution to my IT needs.
@aseigo
The boot process should be a beautiful screen with a nice little turning effect (like the one when the CD first boots up into SuSE). Only way to get into the scrolling text boot-up should be pressing Esc. I very much like the artwork on 10.1 too =). Blue is good.
Also, hard to argue that Novell is more-or-less solely concentrating on the server when there were *major* efforts put into improving the desktop with (i) creation and development of xgl and compiz, no small thing, and (ii) all the usability testing they've done over the last year on getting the desktop right (there were some good articles and talks on this, I recall a decent one by Nat Friedman). I admit this last effort was more chanelled into gnome, but nevertheless.
@csanchis
I'm pretty sure kde developers use each and every single distribution; you'll quite easily find kde developers using all distros; some mandriva, some like suse, etc
Booting would be even faster if SUSE used InitNG.
> boot process should be a
> beautiful screen with a nice
> little turning effect
that's what i expected to see, but for whatever reason the installation (and this was a "kill the partitions and start from scratch" install) didn't get this right. i've had suse versions on this same machine back to at least 9.0 with none of these kinds of problems.
perhaps the installer just isn't all that great in 10.1? *shrug*
the actual desktop apps themselves are quite solid and work well, however. it's just the integration and initial configuration; but then that's why i use a distro in the first place ;)
> when there were *major* efforts
> put into improving the desktop
"major efforts" and "major results" are two very different things. given my experience with suse 10.0 and 10.1 thus far, they may be putting in the effort, but the results are not following. IME with software projects that's usually because the attention at the upper levels is really elsewhere and the efforts being made aren't being properly supported.
my desktop doesn't have an nvidia card so xgl may as well not exist for me at this point and apparently their usability testing didn't cover the installer or YAST which has continued to get worse rather than better for usability.
if this installation was a person's first impression of desktop linux, i wouldn't expect them to be overly impressed.
then again, compared to the distros of 4 years ago, SUSE 10.1 is terrific. it's compared to some of the desktop distros of today that it fails to shine. it used to be in a leadership position there, but in the last couple years doesn't seem to be maintaining that lead very effectively.
i've been using SUSE pretty much exclusively on my desktop and laptop for several years now, so it's not like i'm enjoying this. in fact i find pretty annoying. =/
at the same time, i've seen continual and impressive results in SUSE on the server side where visible improvements are being made, from YAST's growing server capabilities to Xen to app armour and on and on... *shrug*
maybe 10.1 is just a bit of a desktop hiccup, but then i said the same thing to myself about 10.0. the trend is not making me giddy with excitement.
I'm kind of diappointed in the "new package manager." It seems to be a half-finished hybrid of YAST and some new GTK-based interface. I can't get the new update applet to work at all (I won't go into details) and YAST is still slow as tar. Weirdly, they seem to have left the old "Online Update" applet in place, but it doesn't seem to register any patches anymore. I used to be easy to install NVIDIA drivers and wlan firmware using YAST, but now I don't see how to do that anymore. The whole thing seems like a step backward in usability.
I used Kubuntu Hoary for a while and really fell in love with APT. But, the rest of the system isn't stable enough for me to use at say, work, where I don't have to time to tinker with it.
> Kubuntu Hoary for a while and
> really fell in love with APT.
> But, the rest of the system isn't
> stable enough
yeah, hoary really felt alpha. probably because that's pretty much what it was ;)
breezy was better, but still didn't dislodge suse from my laptop. dapper, combined with suse's 10.1 release, has pushed me over to kubuntu on the laptop however.
i'll keep suse on the desktop machine, though, because i feel a level of commitment to suse both because they've done so well in the past and continue to support kde in numerous ways.
I just installed it today, as I nearly lost all my work from testing out another distro. Oh thanks, partition recory software.
Network manager, seems to work, but doesn't work on my wireless card, however just using YAST not network manager works fine.
Luckily ndiswrapper and acpi works out of the box.
To me there is too many applications that are installed. Why would I want to play "X-moto"?
To me it seems to work better than 10.0 but is equal compared to 9.3 on actually using it, however there are too many YAST options, they need to simplify it, but looking at their professional one, the 'control panel' looks clean and nice to use.
apokryphos, I know that, that's obvious, it was a way of asking Aaron what distribution HE uses. I'm not a native English speaker, maybe what I said didn't sound as I thought in English, I don't know.
I find Suse 10.1 to be a step back compare to Suse 10 in the areas of software installation and stability.
While it is nice to get updated versions of the software, I tend to do that on my own.
They now have a messed up and mixed system where they are using ZMD (Zend Package manager) with Suse's Yast. To top it all all, they are supporting a host of repository types including YUM, yast-style repositories and more, but the combination of different repository types with different tools is a disaster.
Rug barely works, some of the time. Sometimes, you install something from Yast or add an installation source to Yast and then it doesn't show up in the update manager.
To top it all off, the update manager is done in gtk and looks foreign and ugly as hell.
One other thing, I can't get kerry to work for the life of me, no matter what I do.
So, Suse 10.1 is currently a beta that has been released for wide consumption. I have no idea how things are on the Gnome side of things as I don't use it.
Hopefully, patches will be upcoming to fix some of these glaring problems.
If you read planetsuse.org, hardly anyone posts about KDE anymore :/
There have been some posts about Kerry (KDE beagle frontend) and kpowersave, but the KDE : Gnome signal ratio definitely leans towards the latter. I'd try the Gnome install and look at the comparative polish. SuSE is moving in the direction of it's acquisition of Ximian.
> "major efforts" and "major results" are two very different things.
Indeed they are, but if major efforts are actually present then it makes it a lot harder to maintain (as you were) that focus is being lost on the given area, in this case the desktop.
The one and only reason I'd put down to the slight slack in 10.1 is that the distribution simply wasn't given enough time to go through, and was rushed somewhat. There were very major changes in 10.0 -> 10.1, particularly the build system which turned out to be a lot more troublesome than had been expected. The release was delayed several times, and in the end they ended up rushing for a release with more alpha/beta quality early RCs, which stabilised very very significantly throughout, but still left the final product with some hiccups. I just think they should have taken a bit more time, but nevertheless I still find it quite amazing.
> my desktop doesn't have an nvidia card so xgl may as well not exist for me at this point
Fair enough, but you can't really presuppose it doesn't exist when you're talking about efforts put into the desktop. It's a major contribution to the gnu/linux desktop (whether it's THE solution or not :P).
> if this installation was a person's first impression of desktop linux, i wouldn't expect them to be overly impressed.
With Xgl+compiz I've converted quite a few friends over, but even those with old intel cards very much so enjoyed suse, and so far I've found it the best way to get people on to linux, really :). Fedora was very lacking, and Kubuntu was far too troublesome for entirely new users, even the more adventurous ones.
SUSE's installer didn't improve much over the years (and didn't at all from 10.0 -> 10.1) from what I see, but it's still quite a lot better than the Ubuntu text-based installation.
> then again, compared to the distros of 4 years ago, SUSE 10.1 is terrific. it's compared to some of the desktop distros of today that it fails to shine.
I have very little doubt that it maintains that position glowingly. I haven't watched Yast over the years, but still: absolutely no distribution has anything like it. It's still very very good and powerful. To compare it to another distribution you would know well: Kubuntu has absolutely nothing like it. Guidance is a great effort, but it's miles behind yast's power, really.
I tried SUSE (well, and a lot of others) some time in the distance past, then became a very devout Kubuntu user before finally being converted to SUSE again by its outstanding polish. *No* distribution can rival it there, really. It's all the extra little patches and nice small (as well as big, i.e. yast) things that put it well above the rest, IMO.
> i've been using SUSE pretty much exclusively on my desktop and laptop for several years now, so it's not like i'm enjoying this. in fact i find pretty annoying. =/
Indeed, I would too :).
I am so disappointed in SUSE 10.1. I switched to SuSE 8.2 back when RedHat was screwing around with KDE. I was at RedHat 7.3 at the time, and I didn't feel like upgrading to RH8 or RH9. SuSE 8.2 was an extremely pleasant experience, mostly because it was so well integrated with KDE. I currently use SUSE 9.3 for my home server and opensuse 10.0 at work, both of them running KDE 3.5.1.
There were some problems with 10.0 that I hoped would be sorted out in 10.1 -- for example, no support for "legacy" NVIDIA chipsets (TNT, GeForce 256, GeForce 2 GTS, etc..). What I've found in 10.1 is that the problem with legacy NVIDIA cards is even worse now because the old drivers don't even compile anymore.
But that's not even the worst of it. They installed beagle by default -- that beast nearly takes my systems to the knees with the constant harddrive grinding. They replaced susewatcher with zen-updater -- a gtk applet that looks like a turd under KDE. Package management in YAST feels much slower than it used to be in 10.0. The new dependency resolver is unwieldy.
All in all, it seems the old SUSE polish is wearing off. I am not going to upgrade any more systems to SUSE 10.1, and I am not sure I'll be upgrading to 10.2 either. I am now looking for another well polished KDE-centric Linux distribution. Any suggestions?
I really appreciate everyones comments here on Aaron's blog about their experiences with SuSE 10.1. I've noticed that the same types of variation between success and failure seems to occur in almost all discussions of every Linux distro. I wonder how much is due to hardware issues and how much due to QA in the software. I have continued to use my 10.1 install and still haven't found anything not working correctly. If you go to the openSuSE site and look into the project Bugzilla report you see numerous problems that I can't replicate even following the bug reporters steps. Its that way with every project, ask anyone who has ever tried to fix bugs in software. Linux distros have become quite large and complex. Coverty showed recently how impressivly low bug open source projects tend to be, but you don't just have the bugs in a piece of software but between software in how they interact. Novell is obviously not a small technology company and they have a large number of developers employed there doing work on both KDE and GNOME. They have large numbers of people in house and in the community doing QA. Yet, even with that, they have released a version of their distro that obviously leaves a lot to be desired for some users. Makes me a bit uwillingly sympathetic to the plight of Microsoft and Apple. What could SuSE have done to make the outcome better? Ideas/Suggestions (Please check the mailing lists at OpenSuSE before suggesting something)
The font problem (at least for 10.0) is that SUSE enables the autohinter instead of the bytecode interpreter for all fonts. Apparently the autohinter does not do a very good job. To disable it, add the following fragment to to ~/.fonts.conf:
<match target="font">
<edit mode="assign" name="autohint">
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
About graphical boot screens: over the years I've had so many crashes switching from X to a graphical console, that I've decided to use text mode on the console instead. I think this is an architectural issue not yet solved in Linux: who is the boss of the video card, X or the kernel? Right now both assume they own it and sometimes step on each other's toes.
>> lubus' boot improvement patches
It's the first time I hear of those... Can't find much info on google. I'm really curious about where to find them to speed up my boot time which is already shortened thanks to InitNG.
By the way initNG is quite stable and I'm surprised not seeing any major distro shipping with it (I think yoper tried to do so. I don't know if it's done yet). Maybe beacause of some missing init scripts...
@erioll
lubos' patches have been merged into both kde 3.5.3 and 4.0 so you can get them when those are released (or grab kde from svn in the 3.5 branch)
I have just installed 10.1 (64bit on a laptop w 512Mb ram) at home, and im using 10.0 in work (32bit, 512Mb).
I'm sorry to say im dissapointed in 10.1 so far, maybe its because its the 64bit version, but the disk is churning away constantly even as i type this with nothing else running. YAST took 5 minutes (literally) to open, mayybe due to the disk access which was just grinding and grinding away. I am dual booting XP Home on this laptop and it flies along no bother.
Im going to try out 10.1/32 and see if its better, otherwise i'll go back to 10.0 or try another distro.
- Mike
I've tried Kubuntu Dapper Flight 7 and it's simply great and stable. There isn't crashes like in the terrible Hoary or Breezy. Dapper si IMHO the KDE distro with better future.
The redesigned "System and Settings" of Kubuntu is very easy to manage and I hope in few time this control center maybe better than Yast of Suse.
It's just my opinion, in fact I tried Suse time ago and liked it a lot, but prefer Kubuntu.
I hate to disagree here, but on side-by-side comparison (10.1 vs. Kubuntu), doing an install for a former Win user, I found not only was the hardware better supported by 10.1, but it's definitely geared towards my grampa by default. When he pulls up the menu it says 'Image editor' by default. I found it to not only be polished (well, my personal favorite distro is gentoo), but everything just worked. Sure, right now it's _very_ heavy on resources, but I needed a speedy install with something that just worked. I installed the default repos, and packman. Had everything working in under an hour, full mplayer-bin with all codecs, dvd, flash, printer, LCD, etc... support. Don't get me wrong, I'm looking for the better distribution, and if Suse is as horribly supported as people here make it sound I hope that a Kubuntu comes out that 'just works'. I just actually found it a joy to work with and a beautiful interface. I hope to try Kubuntu again at a later date and it just work, but if people keep touching as much as I hear they do I'm not sure it will ever be in 'just work'ing state. :)
I installed 10.1 yesterday and I'm sorry to say I expected a lot more from this version. I consider it a step backwards from 10.0 and I am seriously thinking in reinstalling 10.0 version.
The first ugly impression was during the installation process, the tried to simplify it by separating some of the options into tabs (keyboard layout for example) and that just make it more complicate, but that is not a big deal.
Yast is even slower than in 10.0 and there are several new package-options that make it a mess.
It also installs by default all the mono-sh** (beagle & co included) that no-one wants, but Miguel de Icaza.
Susewatcher was replaced by something that barely works (aside from the commet about the extreme ugly look of this new applet). Forget about installing nvidia drivers or ms-fonts with it...
The fonts in general look really ugly, (I hope the trick with the autohint with solve the problem.)
I use Suse since version 5.2, and when it was bought by Novell I knew that sooner or later the KDE integration will be compromised (abandoned?). Time to leave the nest, Kubuntu?
for me in my laptop is super.
no more problems
acer travelmate centrino 1,6 intel extreme graphics , 512 mb , cdrw , wireless 2200 b/g
xgl is still inacive
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