[CS-FSLUG] Novell brands its own open-source religion

[Nathan T.]

I don't know how Novell achieved the fan following it has now, it
seems like SUSE and Ubuntu are now the kings of the hill. I've found
Ubuntu is simple, but it's underpinnings are more prone to trouble
when you start configuring important stuff like SAMBA. SUSE on the
other hand has elegantly put together YaST and both surface level
configuration as well as under the hood configuration is fairly
smooth, but the distribution is very heavy on system resources, and
installing multimedia support is a real pain in the posterior.

I made quite a bit of progress with SUSE 10.0, I managed to get
partial multimedia support before giving up, but that didn't fix the
sluggish performance, especially the several second long delay time
between playing, stopping and pausing music and changing the volume in
both Amarok and Juk. Of course that was after switching from the
painfully slow realplayer/helix backend to the slightly faster
gstreamer backend.

But I'm not going on trying to ruin SUSE's good name, I'm really
looking for people's comments on this. Has anyone else experienced the
same, and perhaps knows how to resolve these issues? I did heard that
10.1 was substantially faster, but I don't have the bandwidth to get
my hands on it. Every computer I've run SUSE on and found it slow on
was an Intel processor, I was wondering if those who don't notice any
speed problems are using AMD chips?