[CS-FSLUG] Time to jump ship?

[N. Thompson]

I've not heard from SUSE Linux yet on whether or not they run faster then the 
lamentable FTP version so I cannot say that those edition are not good 
however I have found that the FTP version is no longer worth using.

I tried a little experiment, I rebooted the system and the very first thing I 
did when I got into KDE was start XMMS, I found out that my sound card is not 
fully supported (only the back speaker plug works, not the front one), so I 
plugged my head phones in the back and could finally hear the music I was 
playing. Then I started KMail, the music skipped, I proceeded to close KMail 
and the music skipped  even worse. Then I opened Konqueror without any 
noticeable stalling so I headed over to javaboutique.internet.com and went to 
look at a simple java applet and sure enough my music skipped while the 
applet was loading. I continued to re-open KMail which this  time didn't 
cause my music to skip and closed it again without any disturbance in the 
music. I continued the experiment by starting the KDE control centre and 
going to the yast modules, they did not cause the music to skip however as I 
know from previous experience YaST itself does. Finally I started 
OpenOffice.org and the music didn't just skip, it cut out entirely while 
OpenOffice.org took its sweet time starting up and thats when I reached my 
decision.

Also I have found that SUSE cannot handle my USB thumb drives, it got them 
mounted yesterday without any trouble but today they will not mount properly, 
the contents do not show up in Konqueror and Konqueror eventually locks up 
trying.

I have observed from both the LiveCD  and the FTP version of SUSE Linux that 
despite its excellent choice in development tools and the general lack of 
bugs SUSE Linux 9.1 is unfortunately intolerably slow, I was hoping the 
personal and professional editions wouldn't have this problem but I have not 
heard anything to confirm that. Every other distribution I have tried could 
do any kind of processor intensive task without this much trouble so as you 
can probably imagine I'm very disappointed, the distribution would have been 
perfect were it not for the issue with my USB drive and performance thats 
even unbecoming of Windows 98.

I've tried every distribution I can think of, Mandrake, SUSE, Fedora, Debian 
and its derivatives, Slackware, Onebase, Lycoris (older versions), Lindows 
(free giveaway versions, no CNR subscription), Yoper, Libranet (free 
versions),  and none of them succeeded to satisfy what I'm looking for. I'm 
honestly hoping that I'll get some sort of convincing argument to try another 
distribution but as it stands my only incentives to stick with Linux are the 
free developer tools and KDE.

I don't even know if I'm on the same wavelength as the rest of you, I'm 
looking for a distribution that has all the software I'll want on the CD's 
( J2SDK 1.4, KDevelop & Gambas included), which has some sort of control 
panel, KDE 3.2, up to date development software and that doesn't need hours 
for compiling or configuration.

Attached is a list of all the distributions I've tried already.
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