What a piece of crap distro.

I'm not sure what the first post says so I'll just comment on the title. I've always had a soft spot for suse as it was the distro that converted me to linux. I haven't tried 10.3 but a friend has now switched to it as his main distro which is something seeing that he comes from a slackware background. Maybe I'll fire up a vm install and see what all the fuss is about.

its a good effort imo, but everything about it is just so goddamn slow.

The Challenger was a good effort too.

Why, yes. Yes it does.

Did you have an interestingly horrible experience with it recently, or did you just think you'd remind us all lest we forget?

Yes.

I'll have to stick in a vote of support for SuSE here. As indicated above I recently installed SuSE in a vmware appliance and found it to be a very pleasant experience. I used the 1 CD KDE install option and was very impressed with it. Installation and setup was a breeze and everything so far is rock solid.

Now that's not to say that SuSE would be my OS of choice but I don't think there is anything to much that sucks about it. For a beginner this is an ideal distro. It guides you through the whole process with a great GUI and then has a great set of GUI based tools to get on with the job once setup. I go so far as to say it's a much better choice for Linux newbs than the other popular 1 CD kde based distro, kubuntu.

Early next year I'll be setting up a machine for the rest of my family to migrate away from windows on. At this stage SuSE will be my choice for this task.

While I'd be prepared to concede that SuSE is slower than other distros I don't think the difference is obvious enough to bother most users. As for myself I think I'd stick to a highly streamlined and unbloated Arch machine but that's for me as someone who knows his way around a linux box.

SuSE has its place as does any distro that fills a need. I think it's a bit harsh to give it the 'sucks' tag.

ill stick to my 'slow' tag, using it is like trying to swim in a bowl of syrup

So what are the specifics as to why it sucks?

Slow? there's got to be a reason for that.

I can't remember now. I think it had a lot to do with the installation. The SUSE community pretty much blows too. What I do know is that I had great experiences with other distros.

Novell .. patent .. "compliance".. bad ...

openSUSE is not affected by these patent "issues".

The deal did only affect the enterprise solutions of Novell/Suse.

But as some of the stuff goes upstream, like mono, almost every Distribution is taking advantage of the deal but Novell gets the blame.

F-Spot, Banshee, Blam!, Muine, Tomboy utilise mono for example.

Are those projects really 'taking advantage'? Red Hat nor Canonical certainly thought the deal was needed. These projects are just taking advantage of what Novell would do if it ignored Microsofts threat.
But i guess it depends on wether you accept software patents; if you do, you say Novell is paying a blanket licence for GPL-ed work. (I should read the GPL better, but it is certainly not in the spirit of the GPL if it were not a blanket licence.)
However if you do not accept patents, Novell is just joining the charade. I tend to this version, and adding to that, that Ubuntu is excellent, there is no way ill be using SUSE if i can help it.

Personally I'm against software patents, and I wasn't fan of the deal either. But it's still a fact that novell and suse are the main upstream contributors in the linux world, especially concerning gnome/kde.

evolution, (new) networkmanager, the new menu designs are all novell/suse projects.

If you use Ubuntu you will use a huge part of software made by novell/suse as canonical still doesn't contribute much upstream.

They didn't sign a deal with microsoft but they are using the software novell develops.

EDIT:

I forget to mention that Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora are heavily dependant of the suse build service.

Many of the default, non-(m)universe packages in ubuntu are made by suse employees.

The whole patent system in the U.S. is a joke. These F/OSS companies that are under threat of patent suits and FUD should really get together and make something happen, politically. The idea behind patents was simple enough, if still wrong-headed.

It was intended as a system to reward the creators of new inventions and ideas with a temporary monopoly on their new creations. I disagree with that idea, but it wasn't overly burdensome in the beginning. The patents were only in effect for 12 years, IIRC.

Regardless, what's resulted from business collusion with government is something entirely different than what was originally intended. They should throw out the whole patent concept, IMO.

The programer should be paid for their labor. The IT business should sell it's product or service, and may the best competitor win by best serving the consumer. It doesn't need to be more complicated.

I haven't used opensuse since 10.2 ... it was horribly slow. I could not stand it... i mean it was slower than fedora when it came to installing packages/configuring the system. I'm a command line apt person most of the time so it was burdensome. I mean even the command line zypper program was slow. I recall building irssi on gentoo some time back... and that didn't even feel as laggy as installing it on opensuse...

I think software patents are stupid. Thought the deal with MS was pointless. SuSE was the first distro I used way back when before I went to redhat some nearly 10 years ago... but I just couldn't function with whatever that suse command program was called... yast... yeah that's the ticket. I hear 10.3 has sped things up a bit though. Still doubt it's faster than apts so I don't intend on finding out.

I'm going to have to somewhat negate my original response.

I installed OpenSUSE 10.3 and it was actually a fairly good distro. The 1-cd GNOME install worked great. Most of the problems I'm having relate to binary blobs which are uniform across distros (broadcom firmware and nvidia drivers, particularly).

nvidia offers a repository for suse, to get the most recent drivers.

Oh, I got that. It's just that the binary blobs don't necessarily play nice with everything else.

For instance, I had to to screw around in xorg.conf to get suspend/resume working after I installed the nvidia drivers. Random weird things like that.