SUSE Linux 9.1 Personal (a waste of money)

From: Piter (gh_info_at_eunet.at)
Date: 05/30/04 

Date: 30 May 2004 13:05:27 -0700

Hello!

The subject line may seem rather harsh to some of you out there
considering the very good reviews it has got lately. But my
experiences are of a different sort. But judge for yourselves:

A few days ago I installed "SUSE Linux 9.1 Personal". My experiences
with it are of a kind that make me think about reformatting the hard
disk and re-install my old OS, "SUSE Linux 7.3 Personal". The latter
may not be exactly up to date, but at least it works, something I
cannot say of the latest version of SUSE Linux.

"Gnucash", a financial programme I used a lot, wasn't included in the
software. And everybody who knows Gnucash, will understand that it is
more or less impossible to install it by hand if it isn't part of the
distro (hey, even the very creators say that!). I really don't
understand that a "Personal"-Version doesn't include this programme.
Neither is it extremely "obscure", nor would it entail any licensing
fees.

I was also slightly taken aback when I worked with the "konsole" and
found out that the "locate" command wasn't around anymore. What the
hell?

After that I wanted to install some programmes I had already (and
successfully) used with SUSE Linux 7.3, among them "xplns" (an
astronomy programme) and "compupic" (for archiving pictures). I
installed both RPMs using YAST. YAST accepted them, processed them and
didn't complain the least. Nonetheless neither programme was working:
"Segmentation fault". After that I tried out the latest version of
"xplns" which I downloaded for this very purpose. Okay, it was a
version for "RedHat" because "SUSE Linux" wasn't being supported, but
that shouldn't be a problem. We're talking about Linux, not about
different Unices, are we? Also the "xplns"-version dated from October
2003, and "SUSE Linux 9.1" should be current enough to deal with THAT,
shouldn't it? Well, it didn't. The error message this time (excerpt)

-------------------------------------------------
Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
xplns: missing charsets for -*-medium-r-normal-*-14-*
xplns: KSC5601.1987-0
xplns: GB2312.1980-0
[...]
xplns: missing charsets for -*-medium-r-normal-*-14-*-c-*
xplns: KSC5601.1987-0
xplns: GB2312.1980-0
xplns: can't create font.
-------------------------------------------------

Isn't that weird? Programmes, which worked well under "SUSE Linux 7.3
Personal", no longer function when using the latest version of their
OS.

Things weren't very fast either. Okay, okay, I own only a Pentium III
with 866 MHz and about 350 MB of RAM, but that should be enough, at
least according to SUSE.

I admit that I haven't tried out much else, but these points are so
serious that meaningful and serious work with this "distro" seems to
be impossible. It's a pity!

Conclusion: optically the new distro is quite nice, but without a
pre-installed "Gnucash" and without the possibility of adding some
programmes on my own it is utterly useless.

By the way, I believe that I'm entitled to this sort of critique
considering that I spent EUR 29.75 on this distro, a waste of money as
it turned out. But I should have probably heeded the ancient saying:
"Never change a running system." In my opinion it's distros like this
that make Microsoft Windows continue to thrive. And I really don't
like THAT at all (that's way I didn't merely copy or download the
distro but bought it. A stupid thing, I guess).

Nevertheless, does anyone of you know a distro that:
a) includes a lot of software ("Gnucash" amongst it)
b) doesn't require a PENTIUM IV 3 GHz with 512 MB RAM
c) allows installation of additional software?

Yours sincerely,

Piter

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