“I was prepared for this review of SuSE 8.0 Professional to be a no-brainer. I had last used SuSE at version 6.4 before switching to Mandrake. I was basically happy with it then, and figured it had only improved since then. What I’ve seen after using SuSE’s latest and greatest for the past two weeks has surprised me, and not all in a good way.” Read the review at LinuxLookup.
SuSE Linux 8.0 Professional Review
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I’ve been using SuSE for a few days now, and it’s pretty nice. I switched from Mandrake 8.2, which is running on my old primary box. There are some things that Mandrake does better, and some things that Red Hat does better etc. But in general, SuSE is one of the best buttoned-up distros around. Mandrake’s 8.2 was a big disappointment — it was supposed to be all about stability and completeness, but it was worse than 8.1 in those respects! SuSE doesn’t have the Pentium-optimized binaries that Mandrake has (that kind of thing appeals to the racer in me), but it is plenty quick and stable.
The biggest problems so far have been the update feature that quit working right after an update, and the total failure of all the included CD-burning frontends. At this point in my career, I don’t want to have to deal with crap like that, and that’s why I go out and buy a whole distribution. It should work. I’m even using SCSI drives, for crying out loud! But it’s not like other Linux distros, or *BSD, or Windows or MacOS don’t have their own bugs…
I picked up 8.0 for a friend and installed it on his machine. Not too much difference than the 7.3 I’ve been using for a while at home. However, there is one tremendously irritating ‘feature’ he’s found. When using YAST2 to do an online update, it throws up on every package saying that GPG is not installed (although it is, and has been reinstalled again). A similar problem was found by one reviewer at TheRegister. Anyone run up against this? Any work arounds?
Mine did that too, the first time I installed it. When I reinstalled, the problem went away. The first time I did a total custom install, while the time that it worked I accepted the defaults. I think that SuSE 8.0 prefers to do a minimal install up front, so I went with that philosophy, adding apps as I needed them. That seems to work, although I’m none too happy feeling the need to walk on eggs like that.
I’ve read a number of reviews about 8.0 and find all of them surprising. After 3 installs on 2 desktop machines and a sony vaio laptop without 1 problem. Everything works smoothly and I have yet to have anything crash. I have done 2 online updates and except for the time involved they’ve gone smooth each time. So I have a hard time with believing the reviews.
I have been a SuSE fan since 7.0 and I am overall pretty pleased with 8.0. I have installed it already on my primary machine, my girlfriend’s primary machine and my Tech Imp Officer’s laptop as a corporate demo that we CAN do Linux instead of Windows. I got the GPG barf as well, no workaround here. Other than that, everything has been smooth. KDE 3 is the big thing really, much better, IMHO, than KDE 2. Everything is gorgeous and working for me. I had installed Mandrake 8.2 for my gf and it was the worst experience ever. It couldn’t even get a GeForce3 to worst (with or without 3D accel) without me totally repairing it and they had a clever scheme of having their web site not accept the registration code so they refused to support the product. No novice could ever have used Mandrake. And even I am pissed. I think that they are destroying the name of Linux to new users by claiming to tbe the easiest to use when they are the hardest. I definitely found RH, SuSE, Storm, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, QNX and Caldera to be worlds easier to deal with. — My DVD does not boot on either of 2 BenQ drives but worked fine on a few others, I think it is a drive problem, but not sure. It is only so annoying to use the CDs. All in all, I love SuSE 8.0 Pro.
I use Debian on my desktop and SuSE on my laptop. I got a new laptop drive so I thought I would take the opportunity to install SuSE 8.0 on it. Everything went perfectly.
I didn’t have the problem with GPG, but I chose to do a minimal install first. I do this with all Linux installs so I only get the packages I want.
I think 8.0 looks very much like 7.3, which I also liked, but KDE 3 is great and I really like the SuSE theme they added for WindowMaker (not a big deal, but I like the little extras).
For installing on a laptop, I don’t think you can beat SuSE 8.0.
well, there isn’t any distributors in SE Asia…. I wouldn’t mind paying for the ISOs and the bandwidth cost….
Hi,
the installation looks nice, but unfortunately I haven’t been successful so far installing this distribution on two 100 gigabyte hds from WD connected to a Promise Fast Track TX2 – after a reboot I am getting a kernel panic – hmpf!
SuSE’s support db didn’t help me – partitioning twice didn’t work for me …
Anyone having a solution?
Ciao,
Sebastian
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