[ravenmore]

Kinda technical, but I know a lot of you guys are in the tech field. I'll probably post this on one of sharky extreme's forums also, but thought it was worth a "fly by" here....

For you fellow geeks out there, I just installed the latest version of SuSe - I wanted to take the new 2.4.4 kernel for a spin. I have to admit, I'm actually using it this time around. My previous attempts were aborted because of unstable apps crashing the system at every turn and trashing it beyound my meager abilities to recover. This time around it's much more stable, and I'm really digging windowmaker, I almost like this gui better than windows.

Things I still don't like:
-Star Office takes so dad gum long to load.
-Packages don't have everything they need in them sometimes(dependencies). Don't understand the logic here. For the love of God, if you need something to run your software put it in the dang package.....
-learning curve (hey, nothing you can do about this). Just mention it because it's frustrating when you don't know how to do something simple like look at the contents of your cd rom, or check free space on a hard drive. But heck, that's my prob, not the OS.
-Can't run everything you want. There's a lot of software, esp. games, that I'd like to use/play that are not available for linux.
-Support isn't all that great (not as bad now that I've discovered some tech message boards though!)

Things I like:
-It's different
-linux can "talk" to darn near anything. Mac, windows 9x boxes, windows ntfs boxes, win2k boxes("new" vesion of ntfs), main frames, ect... No prob.
-linux can be installed on multiple platforms. I386, Mac, heck, even main frames I think (although in the latter instance probably a more standard flavor of Unix would be in order)
-xterm remembers commands even between rebooting (nice!!!). Great for when you're learning - when you do something right command wise it's stored so you can go back and see how you did it.
-Lot of eye candy. Themes for the various window managers put anything available for microsoft to shame. And is it just me, or does the display just look sharper/crisper in linux? I think linux video drivers are just bad to the bone.
-lotta free apps. more than you can shake a stick at.
-Oh yeah, you can download almost all distro's for FREE!!!

Allrighty, I'm done. Just thought I'd see what you guys thought of the OS.

-Mike

[schrocat]

Ravenmore...
You just about covered it bro.

I was using freeBSD (another flavor) for the last few months for ONE app...Scotty2/tkined.
It's a highly scaleable network mapping tool. Kinda like Openview, but open source.

I like freeBSD a lot! But it's the polar opposite of SuSE in the sense that all the bells and whistles are not installed by default. The footprint is clean and small. If you want fluff you gotta add it.
I also ran windowmaker and loved the virtual desktops!
Blew windows out of the water!
I had a desktop for each process...graphics,network,main,development... etc
Kept me way organized!

Then a friend suggested I go and try the newest SuSE to see how much of my windows based work could be offloaded onto its desktop.
Not being familiar with it I was a little nervous...
Talk about erroneous suspicions!

So far I can do EVERYTHING on my SuSE box, with the exception of a Sniffer applet which I only like because of it's GUI. It's not critical.
Mail setup (Evolution) with the MSexchange server took like...20 seconds.
Printing to an NT share?
No problem.

How about the login screen that allows you snag a profile or X window manager de jour!

SWEET!

I ran the sawfish manager for a bit...but went back to windowmaker because it was familiar.
I like the LEETER THAN YOU theme...even though we spell it 3L33T in my neck of the net.

SuSE is pretty slick.

later,

[Aragorn]

Linux, eh? I hear that they've got good driver support as well. I'm an OpenBSD kinda guy myself. Was thinkin' about putting OpenBSD and Win2K on my forthcoming laptop. Linux might be an option though.

[Justler]

heh... FreeBSD is not a flavor of linux. You could say it is a flavor of unix... and it will be good for network mapping. It has the best TCP stack around hands down

[schrocat]

Originally posted by Justler
heh... FreeBSD is not a flavor of linux. You could say it is a flavor of unix... and it will be good for network mapping. It has the best TCP stack around hands down

Thanks for pointing that out!
I wasn't clear enough.
Hope I didn't misinform!

Is the TCP stack good enough for Microsoft?

[Justler]

please don't start bashing MS ... If I wanted that, I wanted to hear that, I would go read slash(linuxnazi)dot or something...

[schrocat]

I understand.

ummm...could you help me identify this hitchhiker?

Is this aptaisia?

[ravenmore]

Borg drone?

"Resistance is futile".......

I think he already assimilated netscape, macintosh, and sun java.......