Linked by Leo Spalteholz on Wed 9th Jun 2004 07:59 UTC
I'm sure everyone is sick of reading reviews of Suse 9.1 by now but perhaps this one is a little different. This is not an ordinary review in the sense that I don't provide lots of colourful screenshots, or ramble on endlessly about the included software versions and other trivial things. Written from the point of view of a Debian user trying to switch to an "easier" distribution, I concentrated on how Suse stacks up compared to some of the traditional Debian strengths.
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This "review" is really not very comprehensive. The fact that Suse, like most other distributions, does not ship full-featured multimedia/codec support is well known.
Leaving the legal impediments aside, you have to consider that development in this domain advances fast, the 3 month or so release cycle of Suse is too long to always offer recent versions of multimedia applications. So basically get your packages from third party source or (better yet) compile yourself.
Regarding the package management: Yes, yast is not fast. But apt-get neither is. But a bit of psychology must be mentioned here. In apt-get, you invoke your command on the shell and then do something else useful. So you perceive apt-get not as slow. Whereas with yast (or other graphical managers), you wait for the different dialogs and selections to appears, watching on status bars, etc...
So it is perceived slower because you wait on it.
For a list of installed packages: rpm -qa : This appears quite fast to me, don't know what the author wants.
Regarding the network configuration thing: His reasoning appears a bit flawed to me. For sure before setting the ip address of one device, you first have to know which devices you have in your system. Sure, you do not have to detect the devices, you can also read them up somewhere (you <=> your computer program). But think: What is a frequent reason for changing an ip address? It is because you inserted new network hardware. So detecting network hardware as a preliminary step make sense (Especially as detection takes about one second). If you really do not want detection, you can use ifconfig or set it up in the configuration files.
As for some commentaries which go like "My keyboard/mouse/... does not work with Suse -> do not use Suse."
This is a rather unhelpful way of giving advice, because one small sample (yours) does not say anything about the general state of affairs. To give good avice on this issue would be to collect a database of many users who contribute their experiences.
(Btw.: It took endless hours to configure keyboard and related stuff for a relative of mine in debian. With some configuration the umlauts worked on plain bash but not in X11, sometimes they worked in plain bash and in an X11 shell, but not in other X apps, sometimes they worked never, and so it went on and on and on...)