SuSe Linux 9 experience

[Mac the Knife]

This isn't meant to be an exhaustive or detailed review - just some remarks I thought might be interesting after a month or so of use. Note that I don't run many games, so can't comment about that side of it. I'm not a REAL techie so please forgive errors & omissions.

SuSe Linux 9 follows on from SuSe Linux 8, which I have been using intermittently for the last year or so. Although I found SuSe 8 fun to play with there was never really any question of moving moving to it as a main OS. Installation was fairly painless and the troublesome X Window configuration much easier. Unfairly, I was running it on a Pentium II/230MHz/256MB and found it slow and fiddly to configure. I had a bit of knowledge of Linux having tinkered with various earlier distros (Corel, Slackware) and considerable DOS/Win9.x experience but I had to spend a lot of time poking in books and HOWTOs and on the Web before everything was up and running smoothly and all the machines could see and talk to each other on my home network.

The versions of OpenOffice and StarOffice were clunky and idiosyncratic and (crucially) had trouble opening Powerpoint presentations. Without a good graphics/photoediting package I couldn't do much. I though Konqueror a clumsy web browser and the early Opera not much better.

SuSe 9 on a PIII/800MHz/256MB is a whole other ball-game (still unfair compared to XP on an Athlon 2700+ though faster than Win98 on the same machine). Installation is quick, the wizards slick and if I hadn't been interfacing to a M$ network I'd have been up and running in less time than it takes to install Windows. The user's Windows drives (this is a dual boot system using GRUB) are now found and mounted automatically - a great convenience. The KDE 3.1 desktop (I haven't used GNOME much) and general interface is graphically gorgeous, much more Windows like and easy to navigate. OpenOffice 1.1.0 is a huge improvement and in many ways better than Office 97 - no more trouble working with Office files, though presentations with heavy graphics content take quite a while to convert. Ximian Evolution is a great email client and a vastly superior Outlook substitute.

Konqueror is now a reasonable browser, though I prefer Opera or the superb Mozilla. As a file manipulator I still find Konqueror clumsy and inferior to Windows Explorer. Midnight Commander, though beloved by Linux gurus, has to be the clunkiest file tool I've ever used - even early versions of PCTools did it better - though the interface has improved a bit.

I'm still struggling with photoediting/image manipulation - I'm so used to Paint Shop Pro that transitioning to the GIMP is painful. The whole approach is very different and though the GIMP is very powerful (it can do some things easily that are tricky in Paint Shop Pro) it still feels clumsy - presumably I'll get used to it. There is no equivalent to Irfanview (though Irfan tells me that it works under WINE and he is planning a port) and sorting large numbers of images is a chore (or I just haven't found the right app).

As far as bundled software goes the main problem is sorting through the sheer amount of stuff that you get! F'rinstance, there's an excellent Palm desktop buried in the mass. It can be difficult to decide which of dozens of apps for a particular task (such as CD writing) you are most comfortable with and work well for you.

The equivalent to the Start menu works well as it is, but is almost impossible to configure to your liking - I'm told that KDE 3.2 will fix this.

Surprisingly, for such a network orientated OS, interfacing smoothly to a Windows network is not so easy. Samba and LISa/ResLISA are still difficult to set up (for a newbie) and involve a lot of arcane fiddling with configuration files that could easily have been managed with a wizard. But perhaps they figured that anyone on a network would have a tame sysadmin!

Graphics drivers are the biggest pain, only NVidia have consistently backed Linux and other manufacturers support is spotty. Suse provide basic drivers for common cards that may or may not be enough. Matrox have finally released a driver for the Parhelia line that works well with my G450, but although 1024 x 768 x 24 is perfect I'm still trying to get 800 x 600 and dual-display working on my 17" monitors (it should but doesn't yet). Prospective users would do well to check driver availability and match the card to the OS rather than vice-versa. This is where the Mac has the advantage of course - when you've only got Mac hardware then it's easy to make sure that the Mac OS can handle it!

Most of my irritations have been due to engrained Windows habits and being used to the sloppy M$ default security model, but for the first-time user, not over-encumbered by Micro$haft habits, SuSe 9 would be eminently usable. So I guess Linux has finally really come to the desktop.

The kicker of course is that you get the OS, Office and a whole slew of other stuff for less than 10% of what you'd normally pay (for the M$ package). Spread this across a few machines in a small office environment and the cost shrinks proportionately. Pretty much a no-brainer if I had a small business.

So, Mr. Average Joe, if you are considering buying a computer, give some thought towards putting the money that you would have spent on the OS/apps/antivirus/firewalls into simply getting better hardware and running SuSe Linux 9.