Patrick wrote:After getting xorg 7 working on my laptop strange things have been happening:
- my network card does not always work at startup
- my wireless card does not always work
- plugging in an exteral usb mouse is not working
- automounting is acting a little flakey, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't
I'm seriously considering switching to another distro for my laptop. It's a shame because I really like Arch and the people behind it. In fact I just donated some money to the project. It will stay on my main workstation. I'm currently weighing my options for my laptop. I'm might have to try Ubuntu or Slackware again. I might even try Kanotix on it. I guess bleeding edge isn't always good. I'm a little bummed out right now.
SUSE dude, I'm telling ya!
If you get 10.0, there's KDE 3.5 packages for it, and a lot of good stuff, might not be as fast as Slackware, but works very well on pretty much every single laptop I've tried it on, with the wireless working. Out-of-the-box multimedia support is not very good, but I'd say Ubuntu is worse in this case, SUSE at least have some limited mp3 support.
Remember if you don't like YaST you can always just install apt4rpm, which by the way is included on the SUSE discs, and use that as a wrapper for RPM (apt-get is a wrapper for dpkg on Debian, in my mind).
I actually recently got two of my friends to abandon Windows completely and run Linux, one of them came to me and said "Troels, I'm tired of Windows, I wanna try Linux again, what distribution should I use?" I went ahead and sent him some links to SUSE, he installed it and I helped him tweak the multimedia support, and now he's totally in love with it. My second friend was sort of like "It takes too much time to learn all that stuff", "I need to have dual boot...." then I told him to just run VMware, and he agreed to wipe out Windows and install SUSE 10, I tell ya I seriously think he's litterally in love with it, he havn't even used VMware yet, I just installed it and multimedia stuff through SSH for him, and now he's just in love with amaroK, Konqueror and all that good stuff. These two examples are enough for me to say that SUSE is great for newbies, because it's easy to guide them through installing the codecs, or just making them enable SSH and you do it for them. And for me, as an advanced user, it's great too.
By the way Pat, if you like the idea of desktop search, try SUSE 10.1 when it's out, it will have a KDE frontend for Beagle (
Beta 1 Screenshot,
An in-use screenshot) as I posted yesterday, which is already integrated with KMail, Konqueror's browser history and the KAddressbook, and of course the more GNOMEish apps, such as Firefox, Evolution, Thunderbird......
10.1 is far from done, right now it seems they reverted it back close to alpha stage, because I think Novell may have wanted some new stuff in the SUSE codebase ASAP, it might be XGL, it might be the huge changes to the package manager that they're doing..... they're not saying much, but more testing usually results in a more solid distro.
