Two long time Linux users - Jerry Kreps and Jethro Cramp - agreed to give us their thoughts on SuSE Linux 8.0. You can find their comments below.
User Perspective 1
by Jerry Kreps
I have used Linux for five years, mainly via purchased copies of SuSE from version 5.0 through 8.0. Two months ago I switched to Mandrake. United Linux only confirmed my decision to switch.
My experience with SuSE is that upgrades don't do very well, but clean installs are marvelous. I usually try the upgrade but always did the clean install because as a programmer I wanted to clean my box up from old coding experiments, etc… . , give each release a fresh start. I had spent weeks tuning SuSE 7.3 so that my r128 acceleration, scanning, CD-R, Lexmark Z52 and my Zip250 worked as I wanted them to. It required a lot of manual tweaking, especially the ATI Rage video card, which required a kernel compile to get acceleration that worked well. I was stunned when I did the upgrade from 7.3 to 8.0. Everything worked without manual tweaking! I eagerly began the clean install of 8.0. When it came up very little worked! I was stunned again! I realized that the upgrade really didn't change any settings or configuration files, just replaced older software with newer software. I was, essentially, running a high class 7.3 SuSE by doing the upgrade. Granted, this is an improvement over previous upgrades, which usually hosed my system, ergo, the reason why I always followed a curious upgrade with a required clean install.
Luckily, I had printed copies of my config files and various settings. But, it still took the better part of a week to get it back up. And, I never got the printer, zip250, scsi scanner (via the ncr53c810a card) working at the same time. They kept confusing the ide-scsi emulation and the parport drivers, and the modules would not load properly. These problems had never occurred in previous SuSE releases. That's when a friend persuaded me to try Mandrake. I am glad he did. Mandrake's hardware recognition and configuration is a lot easier than SuSE's. Also, every time you use YaST2 to change your SuSE installation YaST has to run through a ton of Perl scripts, regardless of what changes you made, and it can take awhile to complete. Mandrake's installation changes are almost instantaneous.
User Perspective 2
by Jethro Cramp
A lot has changed between the previous version and this one. The whole system for storing config files has changed and therefore the sysconfig editor plays a much less important role. The downside is that for experienced SuSE people there is some disorientation, but that is a worthwhile price for progress. In YaST there is a very simple run-level editor where you can control what daemons are started and when, which is very easy to use.
There are, in my opinion, a number of irritating bugs in this release. For example deleting a DSL connection from YaST is impossible, the knock on effect of this for me is that I have moved my computer and no longer have a DSL connection and my routing tables are chaos.
I have installed this distribution for a number of newbies and all I had to explain to them is 'The K is the 'Start' button' and answer general questions: “What are the office packages called? Which is the best one?”, etc. I can honestly say that I think we are very close to Linux on the desktop being a viable solution for businesses.
To sum up my feelings about SuSE8.0 is that it's good, they've broken a lot of new ground, but for the next release they have to polish it a bit more. I expect when 8.1 comes out people will complain that there aren't enough changes in it to justify a release, but they will have failed to notice the improvements under the surface.