Occasional Thoughts

Somehow SuSE has got a bad reputation: Upgrade hassles, old styled RPM packages and a outdated package management as well as the slow Yast configuration.

And yes, there was indeed a time, when SuSE had serious problems here. I remember the 7.x series, where a upgrade and even a fresh installation failed sometimes. When a reconfiguration of server processes was required after a simple update to the next minor release. When I had to search and google for RPM packages that where required and eventually ended in compiling these packages on my own. When Yast often did not do, what I expected.

Finally the day has come, where me as a long-term SuSE user (my first distribution was SuSE 5.3) is going to check out Ubuntu, or more specifically Kubuntu, the Ubuntu version with KDE.

Previously I had worked with many Distributions (Red Hat, RedHat Enterprise Edition, SuSE Enterprise Linux and Debian, all in different versions) and never got the feeling that any of these distributions is much better than SuSE. I worked with SuSE during hard times and tricky updates (6.2 to 6.3 was a real nightmare) and was with SuSE while it became better and better and evolved to the free openSUSE project. 10.2 is still the best distribution I had ever worked with and using the Smart package manager, the RPM dependency nightmares became much easier. Yast 2 is pretty good, when you want to quickly get supported hardware working or set up server software like Postfix or the firewall.