Review of SuSE Professional 9.1

I want to approach this review a little different then most. There are already a number of very detailed and technically oriented reviews done by others on many Linux Desktop Operating Systems, and SuSE has been well documented by the Jem Report, OSNews, ProLinux, Sydney Morning Herald, Mad Penguin, Linux.com just to name a few.

I will just give a personal view of my observations and differences in how they compare to some of the other Linux Desktop Operating Systems I have installed and used.

My objective is not to influence anyone to go out and purchase this or any other desktop O/S as I feel many who read this have done their own homework and comparisons along the way as well.

I used an older test box consisting of a tyan 1854 mother board with a Celeron 400mhz chip, 320mb/ram, an NVidia Riva TNT2 Pro 64 display card, a Phillips 107T 17” monitor, cdrw, and cdrom floppy and Canon BJC4100 printer.

I want to give my impressions on these 4 key areas:

Installation:

Compared to other Linux operating systems I have installed, I would have to say that SuSE is one of the slowest. It seems to create a virtual ram disc where YaST (Yet Another Software Tool) installs, then when it takes over the balance of the install it seems to me that each app has to install via the virtual ram as well. If that infact is the case then those with faster cpu’s and more ram will not be as affected as I was, but the whole thing from rebooting the computer with the freshly burned SuSE ISO, to the first desktop took me about 3.5 hours. That’s the bad news, the thing I love about YaST is that it will during the install allow you to configure and install as little or as much as your experience tells you that you need. During this process you notice it gives you an opportunity to accept or change any part of the install you like. YaST does the job well and very accurately. Now that Novell has release YaST to the open source community, I personally feel you will see some other Linux Desktops using this great tool.

Desktop and Daily usability:

The desktop itself is the KDE 3.2.1 version and that is the default. Gnome and other Window Managers are available to install and may be your desktop of choice, I personally like and use KDE. If during the install you accepted the SuSE defaults, you will not have mozilla installed. Although KDE has done a lot to enhance the daily usability of it’s browser, it still will not be able to launch java apps, without some manual tweaking, or run most media apps especially those of the streaming nature without some manual tweaking. Flash is installed and works on the Konqueror browser, but most everything else I had to manually configure to work, including the installation of additional apps to accomplish this.

The default email client is Kmail, or Kontact. To a lot of folks this is just not feature rich enough to do what they expect from an email client, so you would have to install mozilla-mail or evolution. SuSE is a very well done and a very polished desktop, but when they don’t put the Best apps available to do the job as the defaults, to me it seems that would make some users rethink using it as their desktop of choice.

The default Office Suite is OpenOffice 1.1.1 and comes with the newer crystal iconset as well as some very basic templates. High marks for office app usability on the templates.

K3b is the default cd and dvd burning tool installed and to me in linux there is none better in the GUI category.

I am not a multimeadia buff so my use of these apps on a day to day basis is at the entry level. I am more concerned with browsing to CNN or FOX or MSNBC and streaming the news, so that’s what I look for in my desktop, the ability to go where I want and watch what I want without having to have a degree in application installation.

Although RealPlayer and Kaffein are installed, my browsing in Konqueror to sites requiring RealPlayer to launch to stream the news resulted in numerous seg faults. Marks for multimeadia support from the default browser, I would rate as very poor.

Updating and installing additional software:

With YaST this is almost a nobrainer, although it is a lot slower process then using the command line to say apt-get install (any app) or urpmi in Mandrake, or the Xandros Network or Lycoris installer, it seems to pick up the dependencies and make the installation of apps very easy. They also install on the kicker the SuSE Watcher, which is a tool to let you know apps have been updated, and you can set it up to do the install automatically if you wish. I would have to give them hich marks in the software handling department.

General Impression:

My overall general impression of the operating system is that it is a very well polished system. It handles well in the speed department. It handles application installation extremely well, but for some of the everyday usabiltity tasks the defaut installation is lacking a lot. It is not up to what you would expect if you where to install Lycoris, Xandros, Linspire, or PCLOS. It just seems to me that they forgot what the everyday user likes to do, browse the internet, look at what they want without having to tweak. They have done for the most part a good job, but they have not done what they are capable of doing. They just left too much of that to the user to do, so in my books they failed.

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