Review of Suse Linux 10.1

After the buggy and painful experience of using Fedora Core 5 for 2 months in a real world office environment I have had enough. Since the very-recently-released Fedora Core 6 isn't easily accessible for the time being (late October) I downloaded the remastered DVD iso of Suse Linux 10.1 from opensuse.org (or rather, from one of its mirrors).

Using Windows XP and Getright and Nero to download and burn... that was the easy bit.

Upon taking the DVD to work I powered up my FC5 machine and inserted the DVD and booted from the optical drive. The Welcome screen appeared where I selected the 'Install' option. Lo and behold my near new Dell 1907fp 19inch LCD was unable to display the next screen. Fine. Restart and choose the 1024x768 option. Still no good. Fine!! Restart again and choose the Vesa option. Now I can see the screen!

Problem was my USB mouse no longer works. No, its not broken. It just doesnt work under this f**** Linux distro.

*** Never once in Microsoft's Windows OS did I ever have to fuck around with the mouse. Not in Win3.1, 95, not in NT, and not in Vista... but Linux... Linux can't even get that right. ***

Thank god the installer is accessible using only the keyboard. So I went about partitioning the drives and removing the default option of ReiserFS, the FS created by an alleged murderer. No thanks, and choose ext3.

Since it was an office PC I elected not to install any games. 2 hours later everything was installed on this little P4 1.8Ghz with 768MB RAM. During that time I checked up on the PC twice.. well what do you know... the mouse is working!!! I walked away, came back... and the mouse is now dead!!!!

The Install is finally over and I can finally log on without a mouse. Thats when it occurred to me... oh, oh.. how am I supposed to navigate around without a mouse. Indeed I can't. The Start key on the keyboard doesn't work on Linux (why can't Linux fuckheads get off their highhorses and bind the start key with the equivalent of the start menu?!?!?)

With Windows its very easy to navigate the GUI with just a keyboard. impossible with this Linux distro. So I killed the X Server and cleanly shut down the box. I powered it up again. Linux tells me my ext3 disk hasn't been checked in well over 48,000 days (thats over 132years) and proceeds to carry out a forced check.

Jesus Christ, if they can't even get the basics of the filesystem right how am I supposed to trust this OS?!?!?

Several minutes later the GUi logon appears and I log on. Lo and behold the mouse works!!!!!!!! I have a bit of a look around, checking out the Control Center, configuring Firefox for internet access and Evolution to connect to our mail server.

Grrr... this distro runs very noticeably slower than Fedora Core 5. The GUI is not as snappy. Worse still Firefox is a pain to use since clicking in the 'Address' bar does not respond but pauses around for an awfully long time. It still suffers from the stupid "'save my username and password' so that I don't have to enter it in again next time for the Proxy Server to let me out"
problem.!!!

Evolution works but for some reason I am unable the see the Global Address Book on Exchange. Heck, it worked under FC5!!!!

But Evolution is not replacement for Outlook, not even close. Emails appear with double carriage returns instead of just the one empty line and its not possible to resend existing emails with just a couple of clicks. Initial startup is slow compared to Outlook and the default view of 'sort by date' has the newest emails at the bottem... oh please!!! Which clown wants to
scroll all the way down to check for the latest emails?!?!?

I go into the start menu again and whats this... Games!!! heaps of games installed... WTF!!! I told it not to install any games!!!!!

In other news I am able to connect to a network printerd controlled by a Windows 2003 server and print to it successfully. Thank gooodness. Unfortunately I'm unable to browse the various Windows AD domains and workgroups we've got at our very large office.

It's late and time to do some real work so I'll leave it at that... for now.