[CS-FSLUG] Another SUSE complaint

[Nathan T.]

Hi everyone, I decided to test out SUSE's supposedly restored ability to
play mp3's just to be disappointed. SUSE has for the last few release has
been a joke for multimedia support, version 10.0 isn't very different in
this case either. Two programs on the whole system can actually play mp3's,
one is RealPlayer (yuck!) and the other is amaroK using the helix (ie:
RealPlayer again) backend. I like KDE a lot more than Windows, and was
pleased when things seemed to be going well with SUSE which does look like a
much more professional distribution, but when multimedia support is anything
but present and the only multimedia player to be able to play mp3's has a
3-5 second lag time changing the volume I really can't justify using it and
wouldn't buy a boxed set if it costed $1 and was the only OS on earth.

I'm really not sure whether it would be easier to get third party packages
to fix the multimedia support, install Mandriva 2006 instead and see how
that works out, or whether I should simply stop wasting my time with this
crippleware. SUSE isn't the only distribution to have dumped almost all
multimedia support, in fact over the years it seems like I've heard of or
tried several dozen distributions which decided to cripple multimedia
support to the point where it isn't there. Why is it that no distribution to
date (aside from TurbuLinux which I don't like) is actually attempting to
include good multimedia support out of the box?

I know I'm going to be told that I can add the multimedia support in very
easily, but that hasn't been my experience with SUSE; I have managed it with
Mandrake thanks to the PLF rpms, but every time I've tried it with SUSE it
greatly reduced the stability of several applications. I'm willing to try
installing better multimedia support, in fact I've already downloaded the
packman.links2linux.org <http://packman.links2linux.org> xine RPMs and plan
on installing them later, but I'm going to want to have mp3 support restored
to all of KDE, not just amaroK. I'm also hoping to get better support for
video formats too, if someone wants to volunteer information that would make
this easier I'm all ears.
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