Dan's comments about SuSe

[hellonorman]

I couldn't tell if Dan's comments were limited to the administration tools or to the overall desktop responsiveness. I was kind of looking forward to trying 10.1 with xgl and compiz but if the overall responsiveness is slow I might have to rethink it. Anyone have an opinion about the slowness/fastness of suse?

[Tsuroerusu]

I couldn't tell if Dan's comments were limited to the administration tools or to the overall desktop responsiveness. I was kind of looking forward to trying 10.1 with xgl and compiz but if the overall responsiveness is slow I might have to rethink it. Anyone have an opinion about the slowness/fastness of suse?

I have SUSE 10.1 running on my Mac mini, which uses a piece of shit notebook hard drive, and even at that, SUSE 10.1 is not slow, the new package manager seem a little slow, but I won't know if that is my Mac mini or the actual software that's slow before I install it on my main machine, which I plan to do either tonight or tomorrow.

I have been running SUSE 10.0 since it came out and I think it's not bad at all, it's not Slackware, but it's lightyears faster than Windows Vista probably will be

[thetza]

Suse is slow , at least out of the box. It made my celeron 2.4 ghz laptop crawl... takes long to boot, unresponsive gnome installation. It would probably be much better if I installed the binary nvidia drivers and configured it properly, but thats true for any distro.

[Tsuroerusu]

I finally got SUSE 10.1 installed on my main workstation, and I can say for sure that the new package manager, ZENworks, which YaST is a frontend to now, is very sluggish at times, although that is eaisily fixed by installing the Smart package manager, that one is really fast and works very well.

Even without the NVIDIA drivers, it seem very snappy, boots up in a recent amount of time, applications just seemed to work faster, heck even Java programs like Azureus seem faster for some reason (Compared to 10.0).

[jsusanka]

I got 10.1 installed on a laptop that has 512 meg of ram and petium M 1.4 mghz and it is much faster in opening programs and just dealing with the everyday stuff.

Booting is also much quicker.

I haven't tried the package management stuff yet because I'm giving the mirrors and web site some time to settle down with all the downloads. I am sure they are being pounded these first few days/weeks and that may account for some slowness.

anyway - overall I seem to be impressed by it - I like kerry the beagle kde interface. and I think all the graphics are much better looking.

will be buying my copy when the retail box hits the shelves - that is what I will be upgrading my amd64 with.

[Tsuroerusu]

I got 10.1 installed on a laptop that has 512 meg of ram and petium M 1.4 mghz and it is much faster in opening programs and just dealing with the everyday stuff.

Booting is also much quicker.

Yeah, I noticed that too, everything from stuff like Azureus to OpenOffice just seems faster.

I haven't tried the package management stuff yet because I'm giving the mirrors and web site some time to settle down with all the downloads.

You don't even wanna try out ZENworks, just go to the Guru repository install the Smart package manager along with it's KDE tray icon that will notify you of updates.

I am sure they are being pounded these first few days/weeks and that may account for some slowness.

The mirrors I've tried out seems just as fast as they normally are, I primarily mirrors located in either Germany, Poland, Austria and The Netherlands.

anyway - overall I seem to be impressed by it - I like kerry the beagle kde interface. and I think all the graphics are much better looking.

I litterally found myself drooling over the new wallpaper, god damn that thing is slick!

will be buying my copy when the retail box hits the shelves - that is what I will be upgrading my amd64 with.

If you can, please post a few pictures of it!

[dann]

What I will need to do is sit myself down in front of one of my SuSE systems for a hour or so and record my frustrations and likes. I'll also have to look into upgrading it to the latest stable version of 10.1. I'm not sure if running rc3 automatically pushes me to 10.1 proper or I have to change some repositories and such.

[Tsuroerusu]

What I will need to do is sit myself down in front of one of my SuSE systems for a hour or so and record my frustrations and likes.

When you said YaST was slow, did you mean the package manager or YaST in general? Because the "Software Management" is now just a frontend to ZENworks, which is in my mind, an incomplete product, it needs far more testing and tweaking to be prime time.

I'll also have to look into upgrading it to the latest stable version of 10.1. I'm not sure if running rc3 automatically pushes me to 10.1 proper or I have to change some repositories and such.

I think you need to add the installation source for the final 10.1 FTP tree off a mirror, open up YaST and select "System Update".

Dann just a question for you, remember the Ubuntu review you did? Where you looked at it from a "general user's perspective", could you try doing that with SUSE too in addition to looking at it from your own personal view? Because of course it's gonna be slower than Slackware, SUSE has a more advanced package management system and other stuff in general that makes it so different, so I wasn't surprised at all from your statement that the speed frustrated you. For example, SUSE installer takes a lot longer to load than Slackware's, because it's meant to be both powerful but also easy to use for the newbie.


Just to get to something different, I did try out XGL, and I was impressed at how stable it already is, but DAMN it's GNOME specific right now! If you run it under KDE, you basically run the KDE desktop with the GNOME window manager, Metacity, and that totally sucks because neither do you have KDE's virtual desktops, nothing integrates and everything becomes a sausage of mess. But besides that, it worked fine and stable, and looked very nice, but until the Qt/KDE extension for Compiz, the compositing manager which is the thing that does all the fancy effects, is finalized, XGL is only gonna be usable for GNOME users, because it makes KDE frustratingly hard to use. There is no doubt in my mind that the reason for this is that Novell focuses on GNOME for their upcoming enterprise desktop, and they don't take KDE in mind in that development process, poor SUSE guys having to abandon the desktop they love.

[CptnObvious999]

I tried out 10.0 and had generally good results but the package manager was a pain to use and it had some flaws I did not like. I tried out 10.1 to see if that was any better, not really. It looked a little better but the package manager wasn't as uptodate or big as Portage. Also my wireless card (Linksys WMP54G) wasn't detected in 10.1 but it was in 10.0, i think this is because the rt2500 drivers don't support SMP in the kernel (although the latest CVS snapshot does) and I was able to get arround this but is was pretty annoying and I know the card a fairely popular. There were a lot of minor annoyances so last night I just installed Gentoo again. Overall SUSE is usually good at detecting hardware, has a good installer and looks good but it lacks the power I require and I just prefer Portage over it by far (it was kinda nice to not have to compile but I will glady compile everything, Portage is just that good ).

[Tsuroerusu]

I tried out 10.0 and had generally good results but the package manager was a pain to use and it had some flaws I did not like. I tried out 10.1 to see if that was any better, not really. It looked a little better but the package manager wasn't as uptodate or big as Portage.

Cut the the SUSE guys some slack with the package manager in 10.1, Novell forced ZENworks into SUSE 10.1 late in the development stage, so it has received far from adequate amount of testing, and caused problems in general.
Also, a little tip for you, if you don't like YaST, you just install apt/synaptic or smart and you're set to go.

Also my wireless card (Linksys WMP54G) wasn't detected in 10.1 but it was in 10.0, i think this is because the rt2500 drivers don't support SMP in the kernel (although the latest CVS snapshot does) and I was able to get arround this but is was pretty annoying and I know the card a fairely popular.

If you go look on the mirrors: http://download.opensuse.org/distributi ... suse/i586/

You'll notice a file called: wlan-kmp-smp-1_2.6.16.13_4-13.i586.rpm
That is the WLAN drivers for SMP CPUs. Novell received some complaints from some kernel hackers because they were shipping the Atheros (madwifi) drivers along with the distro, and that would be considered a GPL violation, because you are linking non-Free stuff to the kernel, so Novell trashed all the non-Free modules they used to ship in the kernel-*-nongpl packages, and will no longer ship non-Free kernel drivers.

There were a lot of minor annoyances so last night I just installed Gentoo again. Overall SUSE is usually good at detecting hardware, has a good installer and looks good but it lacks the power I require and I just prefer Portage over it by far (it was kinda nice to not have to compile but I will glady compile everything, Portage is just that good ).

You must have a dual-CPU_dual-core Opteron system or something a lot of time
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist playing that joke again)

[CptnObvious999]

Cut the the SUSE guys some slack with the package manager in 10.1, Novell forced ZENworks into SUSE 10.1 late in the development stage, so it has received far from adequate amount of testing, and caused problems in general.
Also, a little tip for you, if you don't like YaST, you just install apt/synaptic or smart and you're set to go.

I don't think I should need to get another package management system, it should be the good one by default and there are too many repositories with too few packages in them. There isn't enough collaboration between people and they create repository upon repository while things break at different levels. They should all come together and make one that works well and has most of the packages anyone should need. Also why would they rush something in like that when its not supposed to be unstable, it doesn't even come with KDE 3.5.2 which is just a minor update and was released about a month ago.

Also my wireless card (Linksys WMP54G) wasn't detected in 10.1 but it was in 10.0, i think this is because the rt2500 drivers don't support SMP in the kernel (although the latest CVS snapshot does) and I was able to get arround this but is was pretty annoying and I know the card a fairely popular.

If you go look on the mirrors: http://download.opensuse.org/distributi ... suse/i586/

You'll notice a file called: wlan-kmp-smp-1_2.6.16.13_4-13.i586.rpm
That is the WLAN drivers for SMP CPUs. Novell received some complaints from some kernel hackers because they were shipping the Atheros (madwifi) drivers along with the distro, and that would be considered a GPL violation, because you are linking non-Free stuff to the kernel, so Novell trashed all the non-Free modules they used to ship in the kernel-*-nongpl packages, and will no longer ship non-Free kernel drivers.

I know but if you install a distro as a noob you don't know about kmp's or modules or all that, they want it to work with as little interaction as possible, if they install it and their internet doesn't work they will probly just reinstall Windows and say its not worth the trouble. Even for me it took a little while to figure out how to get my wifi card to work. Also the rt2500 is under the GPL so there should be no liceansing issues.

There were a lot of minor annoyances so last night I just installed Gentoo again. Overall SUSE is usually good at detecting hardware, has a good installer and looks good but it lacks the power I require and I just prefer Portage over it by far (it was kinda nice to not have to compile but I will glady compile everything, Portage is just that good ).

You must have a dual-CPU_dual-core Opteron system or something a lot of time
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist playing that joke again)

I started it last night and had KDE up by noon with pretty highly optimized CFLAGS ("-march=k8 -O3 -pipe -msse3") and at least 35% of all the USE flag enabled on an AMD64 3700+ (OC to 2.5GHz). If the Gentoo Installer were out for AMD64 I could have had it done in the same time it took to install SUSE. I gladly compile for a better system.

All I am saying is SUSE is not for me, maybe for you, but it doesn't suit my needs and still needs some work.

[Tsuroerusu]

Also why would they rush something in like that when its not supposed to be unstable, it doesn't even come with KDE 3.5.2 which is just a minor update and was released about a month ago.

Well, I doubt it was the "SUSE guys" per se that rushed that freaking thing in there, people like Andreas Jaegar and the long time SUSE hackers know darn well not to pull a stunt like that, but since Novell is ultimately in charge, you can imagine what can happen. Since they are releasing new enterprise products this summer, and partnering with Dell on a lot of management tools and crap like that, I'm quite that is the reason they pushed ZENworks in, remember SUSE 10.1 will be the base for the Code10 products.
So I think it was pressure upstream that pushed ZENworks into a distro that was already looking good in the beta phase and turning it back into an alpha.

I know but if you install a distro as a noob you don't know about kmp's or modules or all that, they want it to work with as little interaction as possible, if they install it and their internet doesn't work they will probly just reinstall Windows and say its not worth the trouble. Even for me it took a little while to figure out how to get my wifi card to work. Also the rt2500 is under the GPL so there should be no liceansing issues.

I see your point, but I wanna say something here, from which point are you looking at SUSE? From a newbie's perspective or as an advanced user's perspective? I think you are trying to do both, and I think that fundementally makes the distro look worse than it might actually be, because both viewpoints would critisize different things, I seriously doubt a newbie would complain about the speed of the package manager because the software installers for Windows are already slow as shit. And by the way, you are comparing SUSE to Gentoo where you have to do everything manually, but I don't wanna make excuses, whatever modules could be included out of the box, absolutely should be, and I have no idea why they didn't put them in there.

All I am saying is SUSE is not for me, maybe for you, but it doesn't suit my needs and still needs some work.

Of course, people should use what works best for their needs, but I got the feeling that right off the bat you started saying "WTF?", for example if I went to Debian right now, I'd need to find out what repositories carried the packages I need, precisely this happened when I went to Fedora for a good PPC distro, I need to find the repositories that I need. Gentoo has one massive package manager because the thing compiles from source, but I think it's not really that fair to compare that to binary package management, because for Gentoo you really only need to write a script that specifies where the sources are located and so forth.... it's a lot more complex to build an RPM or a DEB package. When trying out a new distro, you kind of need to get into that distro's community and learn where things are located, samething happens if you move to a new town, you need to find out where shit are, school, shop, and stuff like that.

[CptnObvious999]

I know but if you install a distro as a noob you don't know about kmp's or modules or all that, they want it to work with as little interaction as possible, if they install it and their internet doesn't work they will probly just reinstall Windows and say its not worth the trouble. Even for me it took a little while to figure out how to get my wifi card to work. Also the rt2500 is under the GPL so there should be no liceansing issues.

I see your point, but I wanna say something here, from which point are you looking at SUSE? From a newbie's perspective or as an advanced user's perspective? I think you are trying to do both, and I think that fundementally makes the distro look worse than it might actually be, because both viewpoints would critisize different things, I seriously doubt a newbie would complain about the speed of the package manager because the software installers for Windows are already slow as shat. And by the way, you are comparing SUSE to Gentoo where you have to do everything manually, but I don't wanna make excuses, whatever modules could be included out of the box, absolutely should be, and I have no idea why they didn't put them in there.

I was looking at it from the point of a noobie, I was saying that if it was even slightly hard for me it would be much worse for a noobie.

All I am saying is SUSE is not for me, maybe for you, but it doesn't suit my needs and still needs some work.

Of course, people should use what works best for their needs, but I got the feeling that right off the bat you started saying "WTF?", for example if I went to Debian right now, I'd need to find out what repositories carried the packages I need, precisely this happened when I went to Fedora for a good PPC distro, I need to find the repositories that I need. Gentoo has one massive package manager because the thing compiles from source, but I think it's not really that fair to compare that to binary package management, because for Gentoo you really only need to write a script that specifies where the sources are located and so forth.... it's a lot more complex to build an RPM or a DEB package. When trying out a new distro, you kind of need to get into that distro's community and learn where things are located, samething happens if you move to a new town, you need to find out where shat are, school, shop, and stuff like that.

I know source based and binary based package managers are different but I still think the same philosophy can work with binary based ones. You just need people to put up requests and such on a bugzilla or similar system and people can make the packages then after a while of testing it can be pushed into the main repository. SUSE has always been very closed and they don't work with the community as much. With something like a big repository it is essential to get the community involved because there are so many different variations of bugs that could occur. Another problem with not being as community driven is that you have strict guidelines instead of "being ready when its ready". You should not have to set a strict guideline on your releases, you should have them out when it has been completed and only then. (except alphas, betas, and rc's).

[Tsuroerusu]

I was looking at it from the point of a noobie, I was saying that if it was even slightly hard for me it would be much worse for a noobie.

Okay, fair enough. I think the reason the WiFi drivers are available as a KMP, is that if there are new drivers available that fix something or do something significant, they don't have to issue a kernel update. The way SUSE handled kernel modules in 10.0 was that everything was included in the kernel RPM package, even the nvidia module, that way your NVIDIA driver didn't brake when you updated it, although that would be considered a GPL violation, same thing was done with the Atheros madwifi driver, and Novell started getting emails from kernel hackers.

I know source based and binary based package managers are different but I still think the same philosophy can work with binary based ones. You just need people to put up requests and such on a bugzilla or similar system and people can make the packages then after a while of testing it can be pushed into the main repository. SUSE has always been very closed and they don't work with the community as much. With something like a big repository it is essential to get the community involved because there are so many different variations of bugs that could occur. Another problem with not being as community driven is that you have strict guidelines instead of "being ready when its ready". You should not have to set a strict guideline on your releases, you should have them out when it has been completed and only then. (except alphas, betas, and rc's).

Apperantly, you missed this news of last year:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1843097,00.asp
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1843530,00.asp

SUSE was closed in the past, but now the distro is wide open, also unlike Debian, who can get away with putting the mad library onto servers in Europe, Novell could be sued for doing that, because they are located in America.

Also, SUSE 10.1 was delayed up the ass, so no, they havn't applied strict crap on it, they released the final version when they felt it was ready. And when you consider how much time they've had to hack on this new package manager, I think they did a great job, and boy do they deserve a rest because they've been working their asses off.

I was just curious, what do you mean by the repositories for SUSE being a mess? You just need the three official ones (inst-source, non-oss-inst-source, updates) and two community repositories (guru, packman) and you have access to themes, multimedia packages and all sorts of stuff, around 7900 packages.

[Judland]

Hey, Tsuro, I have a question for you...

Now that I'm an official member of the Mandriva Club, I've noticed that my KDE desktop now sports an MDKOnline icon (a little applet in my KDE toolbar) that is a visual indicator that either I have all of the latest updates applied to my system or that updates exist that I haven't installed yet.

I was just curious if SuSE had such a thing as part of their desktop environment. If so, I thought of all the people here, you'd be able to satisfy my curiosity on this subject.