Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 7th Oct 2002 07:27 UTC
If there are two things in this apartment that I don't like, that would first be the dog upstairs which barks at 5 AM almost every morning, and the fact that UPS almost never deliver things on our door. They never bother to check if we are in. The SuSE people were very kind to send us the Professional version of SuSE 8.1, but unfortunately, I received it 10 days later after it arrived in the apartment's complex. But now we got it here, we gave it a spin for almost a week, and here is what we think about it.
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I really liked SuSE 8.0 on my laptop. On my desktop machine it was a mess (mostly due to the nVidia drivers, I think). Now that I've started using Red Hat 8.0 on my laptop, I don't think I can switch to anything else just because of the font rendering. It looks SO much better than anything else I've used (on this laptop), including Win2k and XP. I can't get over how crisp and clear everything is. If Microsoft's ClearType worked this well for me I might be tempted back to the Dark Side ...
SuSE 8.0 also flatly refused to work with my Lexmark printer (it listed the printer, but when I selected the printer I'd get a dialog saying, "SuSE does not currently support this printer. Blah Blah Blah ...") Red Hat, Mandrake and ELX all configure that same printer automatically during install (even when plugged into USB port). Ironically enough, SuSE is the only distro that has picked up the printer and popped up a dialog box offering to configure it when I "hotplug" it. Of course, configuration stops with that dialog box I mentioned earlier (thus the irony). That was the main reason I couldn't stay with 8.0 full time, even though in general I loved it. I haven't been able to find any info on whether printing support in 8.1 has been expanded, so I guess I'll just have to test it and find out, in a few weeks/months when they get around to populating the servers for FTP installs. I'm certainly not going to run out and buy a boxed set only to find out I'll need to buy a new printer, too.
Eugenia, you mentioned that 8.1 is built with GCC 3.2 ... in 8.0, I recall that SuSE shipped both Sun's and IBM's java environments that "just worked" in Mozilla/Konqueror. They also shipped a working Flash plugin. Does 8.1 include java/Flash? Having those plugins available without having to manually add them was a big plus in my book for SuSE 8.0 ... yet GCC 3.2 doesn't play well with those plugins, and I'm curious how 8.1 addresses the problem.
Like the subject line says, your review pretty much confirms what I was expecting of 8.1 ... still, even though there's nothing bold and new, I'll have to give it a shot (if only to see if my printer will finally work).
Thanks for the great review.