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 wonder how SuSE accomplished that! Mandrake 9.0 works with those plugins, but it's just a hack: they just compiled Mozilla with GCC 2.96 so that you can download and use the standard plugins. I'm not sure how this is going to affect them in the future, when those plugins (such as the Flash 6 that's in beta now) are released compiled for GCC 3.2. My experience with Mandrake 9.0 and plugins was pretty awful. Java applets would work for a while (or maybe not) and end up making Mozilla *poof* (after which I'd have to CTRL-ESC and manually kill off any dead processes before Mozilla could be restarted). Konqueror was even more hit or miss, but for the most part instead of crashing it would just happily do nothing -- I'd see the blank space where the animation should be and that would be it. With Konqueror and Java, it would often just sit there doing nothing at all.
Red Hat 8.0 (as far as I know) just doesn't work with java, period.
If only I knew for sure SuSE 8.1 would support my printer I'd be in line to buy it tomorrow! But then I'd have to give up Red Hat's beautiful font rendering ... damn.
I wish a distro would be released that integrates the very best of all the others. Imagine SuSE's YAST2 with Red Hat's font rendering and apt repository ( http://psyche.freshrpms.net ), but stocked with the hundreds and hundreds of SuSE and Mandrake packages for just about everything you'd ever want. Now throw in Gentoo's speed-enhancing kernel patches, optimized binaries (i686, Athlon, P3/4) and excellent RC scripts; add Mandrake's hardware support and Supermount; then toss in ELX' Launchpads, automatic Windows/SAMBA network configuration and attention to detail in making sure the installed apps actually work ... but that's just a pipe dream, I suppose.
Sometimes I wonder if the people producing distros ever really look at what their competition is doing. ALL of them could learn a whole lot that way!