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Wow..

I love how I'm getting modded to oblivion for that comment.

Heh..I was using SuSE back in the 4.2 days and enjoyed tinkering with it very much! Of course I was usually forced to head back to Windows in those days because even with 7 cds SuSE couldn't provide everything needed for a working system and I was without internet so I couldn't just use the unofficial repositories to get what I needed. I still appreciated those cds though as they gave me a better taste of what was possible in Linux...

How many of those modding me down had even heard of SuSE back when it was in the 4.xx versions? How many are doing so because they're Novel fanboys?

--bornagainpenguin

Umm, I didn't use SuSE back in the days of version 4.2, but I did use Windows back then. I can state with full certainty that SuSE 4.2 contained a helluva lot more applications back in the day than did Windows of the same era. I don't know why you're acting retarded!

Edited 2007-09-21 18:23

Yes the good old days of big boxen with multiple CD's and heavy manuals

I didn't start as early as you did, but certainly a lot of time before SuSE was bought by Novel. I was quite suspicious of Novel to start with. The great 9.0 was the last release by the old ownership, and from there on I felt that SUSE was going downhill somehow.
However 10.2 is my main OS and I expect 10.3 to really rock.
Besides I'd almost say that SUSE/openSUSE isn't just a desktop distro. It can be used for many purposes, almost like Debian.

SuSE 6 came with four CDs and a big manual written in Latex in German, and then translated for us Englishers: I know because I bought it. I doubt very much SuSE 4.2 came with more than 7 CDs, in fact I suspect it was less than four. Indeed, when 4.2 was released in 96, KDE had only just been proposed by Matt Ettrich: without KDE or Gnome (which came after 6.0) there was little need for so many CDs. No-one would have used it expecting to get a great desktop experience, the best you could hope for was fvwm95, and the lack of desktop applications meant it was only good enough for people who wanted to use the Unix console.

All of which makes me wonder if you really did use SuSE 4.2, or if you dragged out an obscure reference to back up a somewhat weak, and definitely inflamatory assumption.

Qt and Intel sponsor huge amounts of work in X11; RedHat leads the way in desktop standardisation, and has developed a number of configuration utilities; Novell, with Mono, have done a lot of work in apps like Banshee and others, and Ubuntu have done a lot of work creating configuration utilities (like RedHat) and packaging all the software in a manner conducive to use by non-technical users. They currently lead the pack in that regard, but are by no means the only game in town.

I've always viewed ubuntu as a slimmed down version of Linux. I don't mean featureless, but rather they don't try to install a bunch of crap by default and instead opt for more of a minimum.

I don't view Ubuntu as being any better or worse than any other distro. The one thing I've always like about ubuntu is that it comes on one CD. I've also found synaptic to be a good package manager. And over all easy to use. I think ubuntu has good direction, simply put.

However, I think openSuse has the ability to steal some thunder from ubuntu. I haven't used openSuse since 10.1, but I have every intention of trying out the final release of 10.3.

openSuse 10.3 seems to have some very positive buzz around it. I look forward to trying it out.