Installed SuSE 7.2 yesterday...

[BlvdKing]

Damn is it ever nice! It's like Mandrake only without those stupid RPM's. It was easy to set up and IMO the installer looked and worked better than Mandrake. It also comes with some stickers and a cool case badge (perks I guess). I would definately recommend SuSE to those who are sick of dealing with all the quirks in Mandrake.

The only real problem I have seen is with the documentation. There is alot of documentation on how to install SuSE, but not on how to configure it. For example, it took me about 8 hours to figure out how SuSE personal firewall works. The documetation has a total of three sentences dedicated to SuSE personal firewall. The website documentation is a jumbled mess of HOWTO's and definations that doesn't seperate any of the versions from each other. Typing in IP MASQ into the search field brought up masquerading for versions as old as 5.X! Eventually I figured it out, but not without a search through 10+ pages on Google. I found out that personal firewall isn't configurable and that I had to use IP Chains to make the computer into a router. Three commands later in the console and a little bit of configuring on my Winders machines and VIOLA! Internet connection sharing on a firewall. 2 minutes out of 8 hours total. Why couldn't they have written something about IP Chains and ICS in the huge books they shipped with it?!

 

[thornc]

Yap, SuSe is a very nice distro.... but they do use RPM!

 

[n0cmonkey]

suse has always gotten decent reviews (since I started paying attention) but always lost points for documentation.

 

[BlvdKing]

I can't believe that the documentation is so bad. SuSE 7.2 comes with three books: a quick guide to installation, another guide to installation with some explanations and definitions, and an applications book. The application book gives instructions on how to use KDE 2, Gnome, and Yast. I know they can't cover everything, but Mandrake's website has some really awesome tutorials and walk-throughs that help with some common questions (cd burning, networking, firewall). They shouldn't be so worried about installation; it's the easiest part.

I though SuSE only had experimental support for RPM's. Still learning...

Now I need to figure out how to set up my CD burner and get rid of some excess programs and I'm all set!

 

[n0cmonkey]

Linux in general has horrible documentation. Eveything moves too fast for the documentation to keep up. Not to mention the people that should be writing documentation really have to choose between that and coding something new.

 

[Elledan]

<< Linux in general has horrible documentation. Eveything moves too fast for the documentation to keep up. Not to mention the people that should be writing documentation really have to choose between that and coding something new. >>



:: Pokes n0cmonkey ::

Luckily the development of *BSD goes so slow that they've enough time to write documentation 😛😉

 

[n0cmonkey]

<<

<< Linux in general has horrible documentation. Eveything moves too fast for the documentation to keep up. Not to mention the people that should be writing documentation really have to choose between that and coding something new. >>



:: Pokes n0cmonkey ::

Luckily the development of *BSD goes so slow that they've enough time to write documentation 😛😉 >>



Damn straight 😉

The best documentation I have ever seen is for OpenBSD. Their faq is far superior to the whole of the documentation I can find on any specific linux distribution. FreeBSD comes second. The number of books for FreeBSD is growing quite frequently, and most (if not all) are available for FREE on the net. But documentation for all of these projects is lacking. Like I said, the developers have to decide between new code, and writing docs for newbies. I say go for the code, and hope I can keep the newbies busy for a while 😛