I‘m using Novell’s Suse 10, currently. It’s the first time I’ve used an RPM-based distro for an extended period in about two and a half years; so far, the experience has been pretty positive.
A few thoughts on the install and use of Suse 10, the “personal” (read: free) version.
- Install was extremely well done; Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, Ubuntu and other Linuxes have had good installation systems for some time now, but this one was not only technically good, but extremely user-friendly. That is, a relatively unsophisticated computer user could install it quite easily.
- It intelligently installed itself around an existing Windows partition; no need to be very concerned at all. I didn’t even really see the option to overwrite Windows (it’s probably there, but I wanted to dual-boot, so I didn’t look too hard).
- GNOME and KDE are now fully fledged option during the install; you pick which one you’d prefer fairly early on. I believe that hitherto, KDE was the default, and you would have had to install and switch to Gnome separately after the installation.
- Getting 3D acceleration working took a reboot or two, but I think it was still fairly painless. My main thought on that is that an the average user might not have known that this needed to be done, and would have been disappointed that it wasn’t working “automatically”. I don’t see any real way around that, unless we start seeing Linux pre-installed on PCs… which I hope we do see more of.
- Because it’s a free edition, and it’s a corporate product, it also does not include any software that might violate copyrights or patents — so no playing mp3s, DVDs, or most other video formats “out of the box.” Again, this wasn’t too hard to fix: a few Google searches and RPM downloads later, it was all up and running. Not the most user-friendly, though (since many users would not know why it didn’t “just work” or what to do about it); again, this could be easily sidestepped by selling PCs with fully preconfigured Linux OSes, and bundling any costs associated with licensing into the PC cost.
- So far, it’s quite stable. There are automatic updates, and they work quite well, so far.
I’ve only been using it for a little over a week, so those are my only thoughts so far. If it sounds interesting, maybe give Suse 10 a try.
