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.
However Yast 2 is also pretty slow and its deep integration into the Linux system caused several configuration woes in the past.
Another thing that really annoyed me at openSuSE 10.2 was the zmd package management. Although I did not use it, but it was called by Yast and slow, slow, slow..... It is removed from 10.3
for good reason. So I could upgrade to 10.3 to get rid of that - but
that's another thing. To be able to upgrade the distribution I must
download a CD image, burn the iso and boot from that CD to be able to
do the upgrade. Ubuntu can do that with a single click from a running
system using the Adept Manager.
What also worries me, is openSUSEs close link to Novell. The
integration of zmd is such an example. I believe zmd would never have
been chosen, if there weren't Novell in the background.
But what really convinced me to seriously try kubuntu was that on SuSE I cannot use hibernate on my laptop, while 3D support using the ATI driver is enabled. Each time I try to suspend, the system gets an interrupt from the ATI driver and resumes. A friend told me that Ubuntu uses suspend2 and that he can suspend his notebook even with 3D support enabled. And I really want those cool 3D desktops 
.
And then when googling for information configuration problems almost all I get are results related to Ubuntu. Either Ubuntu is a very tricky and hard to use system and all the positive reviews are false or almost everybody is using Ubuntu these days. At least it is good to know that it's easy to find help. I would be very surprised, if I won't test this in the next days.
However I am not going to jump into the cool water. First I will install Kubuntu 7.10 within a VMware image to get a first impression about the distribution.
Stay tuned... I'll write more about my findings and the journey to become a happy kubuntu user - or regret it.
UPDATE: Here is the promised posting: First Kubuntu Impressions
As I already wrote I am getting curious what is really behind this Ubuntu hype. All the time I google for some kind of problems I find plenty of information dedicated to Ubuntu. Colleagues started to use Ubuntu and are happy with it. Also the media repo
Tracked: Dec 11, 21:52