So what's this craze about SuSE? Why is it that I hear SuSE this, and SuSE that. I even heard Linux "experts" saying how great it was.

I decided that I might as well try it out. But how? First of all, I could not find ISO images ANYWHERE. Of course I found the Live Eval CDs but what good are they? (WTF is this? Shareware?) Eventually I found a friend that had the CDs, all 7 of them! This isn't soo bad since I heard there were a lot of packages included. So I went ahead and installed it.

I tried to leave a clear, unbiased mind. At first, I stuck the first CD into my CD Drive and set the correct settings in the BIOS to boot up from the CD-ROM drive. It worked perfectly (as it should.) At first I was impressed by its 'professionalism.' Instead of having the white-on-black kernel boot screen, it had SuSE's visually appealing green backround with neat shading and 'professional' design. The installation was nice, and felt a little more professional like Windows (compared to Mandrake's slick, but cheesy looking install) and it was nice enough to automagically detect my previously partitioned ext2 partition and swap. What I didn't realize is that it was also planning to create a /boot partition too, this would prove disastrous as you read ahead. So then I went through some fairly easy menus to set up my Linux box, and selected packages individually. I was impressed by the package selection. Some packages include VMware, Snes9x (which is waaay too cool,) and a barcode creator. This distribution is definitely nice if you don't have a lot of bandwidth and you need a lot of programs on your Linux box. So I went ahead and told it to install the selected packages. This is where it really gets my goat...

It fails to install programs like Perl and YaST. I would find this acceptable with Distributions in development or ones made up of volunteers, but this is supposed to be from a company that pays their employees and is a commercial and a 'professional' distribution. Sure I could install them again when everything is done installing, but that's not really the point. I wouldn't mind this with a non-commercial distro, but not a distro that practically forces you to cough up $79.95. Also, it fails to install its own program utility YaST, their own programmed commercial proprietary software.

After I went insane, I finished installing and rebooted my computer, I stuck in the LILO bootdisk and started up SuSE. Of course, the pretty SuSE kernel screen displays all the things starting up, but I don't care anymore, looks can't save this dame. I also see it spew out a bunch of errors that don't seem to reassure me. When I entered my login and password KDE loaded up, and things were running pretty fast. Now I needed to set up my NIC (which ironically wasn't asked during the installation.) So I loaded up YaST2 and the damn thing couldn't load because of missing software. Great, some professionalism here. SuSE claims to be "The Linux Experts," I think the true Linux Experts should be offended, that someone is claiming "experts" made this crap.

The worst is not over my friends. So I dump the SuSE off on the side of the freeway and try to boot up back in Win2k, but oh no "ntkernelos.exe is missing or corrupted" and I couldn't load Windows. "Great!" I thought, "there goes all my pr0n that I downloaded on kazaa!" I was about to cry, but then I realized that my partition was not gone, it was placed over another number because of the /boot partition was added. So a simple delete of the partition and everything will be running right? Wrong, after messing with the boot.ini (specifying partition tables 5-7) I finally realized that it put my Win2k partition DOWN instead of up. So now is all is well. And I'm not planning to eat the SuSE gecko for dinner.

So would I recommend SuSE? Hell no. It's not worth it. Everything is backwards with this distribution, and the developers don't seem to care. People say Redhat is the M$ of Linux, but I believe that SuSE is the closest. So am I saying outright that "SuSE sucks!"? Not at all, I tried to give it a fair review, but I ended up hating it altogether. I've tried Slackware, Mandrake, RedHat, LinuxPPC, YellowDog, and Debian. I must say bang-for-the-buck, SuSE is the worst. And I'm not saying this cuz I'm cheap (yea, I may be a poor student,) I'm saying this because the amount of money you pay for this and the amount of value you get out of this, isn't worth it. There are soooo many better distros out there. Personally I recommend the following:

Mandrake - for the typical Desktop newbie. Sure it has bugs, it's bloated, and it's slow, but it is very user-friendly and has very nice tools.

RedHat - is a good distro for the Workstation. It is the most known of the distros and is fairly easy to install. It is also accepted by many businesses.

Debian - I'd recommend this distro for any Server. It has handy tools, and is incredibly stable. Although package development is a tad slow, I believe it really doesn't matter. Instead of concentrating on being on the bleeding edge of technology, it prides itself through stability and thorough testing. SuSE can learn a lot from Debian.

Of course these distros have their strengths and their weaknesses. I wish for the day when a distro comes out with Debian's stability, philosophy, and non-bloatness along with Mandrake's user friendliness. Of course they would have to call it UtopiaLinux, Flying Pigs Linux, or Frozen Hell Linux, cuz it'll never happen :p

So you're still not convinced, do you believe "Give me SuSE or give me death!"? Let me ask you this, have you tried any other distros out? If the answer is no, then try some other ones, don't just stick to one distro because you might find that another distro is superior to yours. If the answer is yes, and you still find SuSE the best, then congratulations, you have found the ultimate bliss in Linux...CHOICE. Nobody's forcing you to use any distro, you're not stuck with lame choices (CE ME NT :p) this is part of what Freedom is about. There are so many diverse applications for Linux that there is no use to start pointless flamewars, we should concentrate all that brainpower on the true enemy...Microsoft :p

Recommended: No