So I decided to give SUSE a try. I had a evaluation copy from Linux World. That worked fine, compiz and all, but was out of date. GNOME 2.12 has been out more than a year now and I couldn’t figure out how to upgraded it via yum. Maybe I’m just stupid.

Next I decided to give OpenSUSE a go. They’re related, right? So I grab version 10.1 remastered, because it’s better, right? Useful for new installations, fixed package manager. Great, I think. Maybe I’m smart enough to figure this one out. The installation looks a lot like the Novell SUSE installer. I figure that must be a good sign. Installation finishes, dvd pops out and I reboot. Into FVWM. What. The. Fuck.

Now, I know the SUSE guys like KDE but Novell ships GNOME as the default desktop. I figured, at the very least, I would start out with KDE and be able to switch my session. No, that was not the case. I figured that, being OpenSUSE, I would have some useful repositories in yast (yast? YaST? YAST?). No. I still couldn’t figure out how to install GNOME or upgrade the system. If, as a new user, I have to go through this in order to unfuck the default package management, your distro has serious problems.

Package management shouldn’t be difficult. The Debian guys have it down pretty solid. You want something? Fire up Synaptic, dselect or use apt-get. Out of the box you have at least two of those options and most distros have Synaptic available by default. Install SUSE and spend a few hours trying to figure out what’s going on and why yast doesn’t work, only to find out it’s broken by default. Here, install this alternate package manager to make our shit useful. Now that’s quality engineering.

[Crossposted from stonetable.org. If you'd like to comment, you can do so either here or there.]

I popped in one of the evaluation SUSE CDs that I had from LinuxWorld last night and installed it to a spare partition on my laptop. The installer was decent and I was booting up to my desktop quick enough.

I haven’t used an RPM-based distro since the Red Hat 7 days. I’ve been Debian/Ubuntu ever since. I know about Yast but I’ve had to feel my way around a bit. My laptop has an ATI X1400 video card, which means I have to use the binary driver from ATI. I installed this by hand, generating SUSE rpms with the installer and then rpm -i (and manually resolving dependencies, boo). Once I figured out how to register yast, it added some sources, one of which included ATI.

I was very surprised that, with only a few minutes of work, I was able to have fully accelerated desktop eye candy running. Wobbly windows, rotating cube, transparency, etc. I’ve never been able to get that working on this machine with Ubuntu.

The downside is that SUSE apparently comes with GNOME 2.10 or 2.12 (the latest being 2.16). I have no idea how to upgrade SUSE to a more recent version, nor do I know how to install the full Mono stack so I can do some work. I suppose I need to find a wiki or something that describes the process.

I don’t know if I’ll switch to SUSE or stick with the development branch of Ubuntu. I certainly like the visual effects that SUSE makes look easy. If I can figure out the basics of Yast, I might just give it a run.

[Crossposted from stonetable.org. If you'd like to comment, you can do so either here or there.]