Rating: 
Summary: Superior Product
Review: This review is primarily in response to the earlier REDHAT RULEZ review. About 2 years ago, I was assigned to install and compare most of the available Linux distros in preparation for starting the move to Linux. At that time, SUSE 7.2 was head and shoulders above the other distros in several areas, such as ease and flexibility of installation, newbie accessibility (except for Mandrake), available apps, and robustness. Despite RedHat's ubiquity in the US (RedHat is US-made, SUSE is German), and the appeal of Debian's DIY style (RedHat and Debian were the two major contenders), we standardized on SUSE. With the exception of our pursuit for canned training, we haven't regretted it. RedHat is BY FAR the best when it comes to making training and certification programs available, and their website simply blows away SUSE's when it comes to usability. When comparing actual distributions however, RedHat appears to always be a step or two behind SUSE. They're both good and well-established distros, and you won't go wrong with either. We prefer SUSE. Try several flavors before settling down with one, but SUSE definitely belongs in anybody's shortlist.
Rating:
Summary: Polished and Complete desktop OS
Review: When it comes to reviewing an OS, I do not believe in writting a "first impression" review. I have now used SuSE 8.1 on two systems for 2 months and this review is based on my expreience. I installed SuSE on a PC and a laptop. On both the systems I had SuSE 8.0 running prior to that.
Installation:
Its time people stop cribbing about linux installation. Yast2 installer makes life really easy. It tales care of HDD partioning, default selection of packages for installation, configures your hardware with very little user intervention. It does not need to restart the system N number of times during installation. If U R a power user the installer has enough juice for you to customize the installation to your hearts content. [ Full 5 starts for YaSt installer] --User Experience ( PC, Athlon 1.1 20 GB + 60 Gb dual HDD, Promise ATA controller, SB Live 5.1, Geforce 3...)
First time after installation you will be greated with a new login window. Login to KDE and u get all the eye candy of Keramik ( Only Suse has back ported Keramik to KDE 3.0). All desktop icons and menus are well thought out, apps are easily located. SuSE includes a good choice of www apps, like Mozilla, Konqueror, GAIM, Evolution. All these apps are stable and one of the best in their breed.
For multimedia, XMMS shipped with SuSE comes with a full suite of sound enhancemnet plugins. Also included is MPlayer that can play most of the Video/Audio formats including wma files.
It also includes Open Office suite , this more or less takes care of documents and spreadsheet.
It includes a full suite of development tools, in fact i have been doing a lot of development on this system including running a cvs server.
Post install configuration is the easy with Yast2, in fact KDE control center also has Yast2 embedded to it. I have this system running since since the day I installed SuSE 8.1, I havent had any instability and have seen no degradion in preformance. --User Experience on Copmaq Preserio 702us laptop.
So far I had seen linux and laptops are dicy thing. But SuSE 8.1 is special. Eariler I had 2 major problem on this laptop
1. ACPI support, SuSE 8.1 is the only distro i have used that has ACPI support built into the default kernel. With other distros the laptop becomes too hot to be used for a longer time.
2. Sound Support: Earlier to make sound work on the system I need to rebuild the kernel with a patch for the ac97 codec. But with SuSE 8.1 sound works smoothly with the default kernel.
[BTW i have tried Mandrake 9.0 on this laptop also, sound works, but no acpi by default]. One thing I would like to see SuSE doing is replacing Blackbox with fluxbox desktop. This is the first time I have given 5 STARS to any Linux distro, SuSE 8.1 deserves it.
Rating:
Summary: Best as always from SuSE
Review: While the latest version is not too big improvement over the previous 8.0, it's still nice to work with. There are a few bugs here and there, but overall I don't think SuSE has any serious competition from other distributions. I'm buying most releases, it's worth to support this company; also, you'll get a plenty of stuff in the retail box. Looking forward for the next version (SuSE 8.2 Pro?), which should be out hopefully within a few months.... Fast installation, online update, no registration necessary, use it on as many PC's you wish, some 4GB of software and 3 nice manuals....not bad compared to pretty bare WinXP. While XP is overall more polished and in my opinion works smoother with multimedia and has way better hardware support, SuSE, on the other hand, NEVER crashes or locks-up; rock-solid OS ...the choice is yours. Owners of some newer hardware may want to wait for the next release, since 8.1's kernel 2.4.19 doesn't have of course support for some of this year's later chipsets, graphics cards etc...but you can still either patch, or install new 2.4.20 kernel if you feel up to the task and need the SuSE distro right now.
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