Re: Is there a better distribution than Suse?
From: Patrick Weber (pat69a_at_lycos.de)
Date: 06/27/04
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Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2004 09:47:08 +0200
Hi Chris,
why don't you try Fedora Core 2?
pAt
Am Fri, 25 Jun 2004 19:19:37 -0700 schrieb Chris Carlen:
> Hi:
>
> I have recently purchased Suse 9.1 after using the distro for many
> versions since about 6.something. I have felt that while the feature
> count has steadily increased over the years, so have the headaches and bugs.
>
> For instance, on 9.1 I am having a nightmare using USB memory sticks.
> The hotplug system has been hacked by Suse to use submount, and it works
> fairly Ok, ecxept when it doesn't. Sometimes it gets really screwed up,
> mounting the device multiple times, Konqueror in KDE not showing the
> device contents when a ls on the CLi shows it, not showing a file that
> was just written, all sorts of insanity.
>
> It's just not reliable at all.
>
> It turns out there was an update to the hotplug package, so on a second
> installation attempt of Suse 9.1, I let it update almost everything
> using their on-line updating capability. Another dangerous feature.
> Just like my experiences attempting to update from one version to the
> next without a complete reinstall, it usually breaks things that are
> extremely difficult to fix afterward.
>
> So with the hotplugging, it is actually *worse* after updating than
> before. Now the hotplugged device fails to unmount every time after it
> is unplugged. Maybe it "works Ok" but I can't trust it like this.
>
> Now the reason I want to use a distro like Suse is that I want to use
> Linux to do work, not to use Linux to work on Linux. So I want decent
> GUI configuration tools to set up printers and NFS servers, and all
> that. But what I don't want is what Suse seems to always do, which is
> not only to provide a nice GUI config tool for the system, but they
> always want to apply customizations to the software packages from
> standard open-source vendors like the Linux hotpolug project,
> OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.
>
> In my experience, these custom compiled packages, which I think Suse
> intends to integrate better with the system than the plain vanilla
> packages, are always broken!
>
> I have not had a Mozilla or OpenOffice yet for several years that didn't
> have problems that went away as soon as I dumped Suse's and installed
> the vanilla. The other bad thing about "well integrated" customizations
> like this, is that you can't update those packages without breaking the
> integration!
>
> So Suse is like this:
>
> 1. Nice Yast config tool, reasonably reliable and helpful: ++
> 2. Terribly habit of supplying broken customized versions of software
> that I could get off the web and install myself: --
>
> But I want a distro like this:
>
> 1. Nice GUI config tool, reasonably reliable and helpful:
> 2. Does not modify 3rd party packages like OOo and Mozilla, so if I
> want to update them with newer versions, I don't break anything, and
> they work in the first place.
>
> I started with Slackware Linux back in 1994 and have been a Linux user
> ever since. So I know how to work on the system configuration at the
> text file level. But remember, I want to use Linux to do work, not to
> work on Linux. I looked at Slackware recently, and I had to conclude
> that I just cannot spend my time hand configuring a system for weeks
> before I can do everything, like I had to do years ago when I did have
> the time to kill.
>
> I also looked at Gentoo, which seems to require everything to be hand
> configured.
>
> I appreciate that these hand-configured distros will probably be very
> little trouble once set up, but I just don't know if I want to go in
> that "manual" direction again.
>
> Is there a distro that has a decent tool like Yast, but doesn't try to
> be smart with integrating apps and breaking software that would have
> worked fine as it came in vanilla form?
>
> Additionally, I got Suse 9.1 because I have a AMD64 on Asus K8V with
> SATA hard drive. I don't want headaches installing to that drive, and I
> also want 2.6.x kernels which seem to really improve the respinsiveness
> of the desktop when IO intensive stuff is going on like CD burning.
>
> There is one final issue: I use a lot of commercial software on my
> Linux, like Mathematica, MatLab, Eagle, and VMware. So I also am
> hesitant to attempt to use one of the distros like Lycorix, or Xandros,
> or whatever they are these days. I must be confident that the
> arrangement of the distro is not so different from the standards like
> Suse and RedHat (which themselves are quite different) so that I don't
> have additional headaches when installing these commercial programs.
>
> I am getting more and more tired of killing time coercing Linux to work,
> when I just want to do my work. I really wish Suse would get their act
> together and provide a well-tested release instead of just more damned
> hip-slick-and-cool "intelligent" and automagic features. But I fear
> this trend has innundated Linux as much as it has Windows.
>
> Thanks for comments.
>
> Good day.
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