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Suse, a notable distro

When my girlfriend bought a new computer I thought about giving a try to Suse 10 – many had suggested it to me. So, as her name is Susan… Suse it’s a nice match :)

One of the main reasons I has willing to try Suse is because of its nice integration with Mono and related applications. Beagle, Banshee and F-Spot come installed and everything seems to work nice, except for ocasional F-Spot crashes.

One of the first things we noticed is that, unlike Fedora, Suse mixes too much of KDE and GNOME, afaik because Suse was Kde-based and is now moving to GNOME. Anyway, thats not good looking sometimes and I hope this will be better in next releases. I also  found strange the YAST toolkit, I don’t think its either Qt or Gtk butdefinitively it doesn’t integrate well, and its ugly.
The NVIDIA card didn’t work well, even with YAST NVIDIA patches/packages, but a visit to NVIDIA web site solved the problem. The processor, a 64 bits, 2.8Ghz Duo Core; DVD+-RW; RAID; memory cards; pen drive; bluetooth; printer; scanner; and the Acer 19′ widescreen were all detected and nicely configured as one would expect from such distro :)

Using the defaults it is a pretty bloathed and slow distribution, slower to boot and use than Windows XP SP2 in fact. When I boot it is using something between 400 and 500MB of RAM that is too much to a 512MB machine. I guess what saves SUSE’s ass is DDR2 and RAID making that high usage of mem and swap almost invisible if we aren’t using too much applications.

The most curious fact is that running Windowx XP SP2 (with visual studio, sql server, IIS, dreamweaver and fireworks) under VMWare is awsome and doesn’t “sound” as bloathed as the GNOME desktop… it even boots faster than the native Windows in dual-boot mode.

If I were asked to give a rank to Suse I would give it 14 in 20, I was surely expecting more but I’ll surely keep an eye in the next releases. hoping to see some improvements, soon.

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One Response to “Suse, a notable distro”

  1. Joseph Hill says:

    I think some of your complaints can be
    addressed by sanitizing Suse:
    http://primates.ximian.com/~rml/sanitize/

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