I decided to try SUSE Linux, which I had always heard a lot of good things about. Release 9.2 Professional is available for free download.
The first thing that surprised me was that the installation was entirely graphical, with an optional text mode for details about the progress. There is almost no need for interaction, as reasonable options are provided by default and most are presented clearly. I felt that the default partitioning settings were vague, however, and opted to customize them in more detail to ensure that my intended partitions were being used (they were not, the installation had — probably wisely — suggested to resize existing partitions to make place for the new ones). This customization is possible for most aspects of the installation, including package selection of course. I declided to install GNOME in addition to the default KDE desktop environment. As the files are copied, some simple changing imagery is shown with explanatory text. This aspect is a lot like the Windows or even Red Hat and Fedora Core installations.
During the installation, my hardware (sound card, graphics card, mouse, network interface card) was accurately detected — including to my great surprise the Hauppauge TV tuner card which had been collecting dust (he, he) for years. As is to be expected even in Microsoft Windows, my monitor was an exception however (more on that later). I declined to specify addresses for my network card as I didn’t have the name servers written down. The installation finished by offering me to download updates, which I declined as I knew it wouldn’t work in the absence of name servers.
Having finished the extremly pleasing and painless installation, I was greeted with a freshly installed version of KDE. During my brief (and sometimes not so brief) stints with Linux desktop usage, this has been a favourite of mine due to the vast opportunites for customization that it provides and perhaps as well because it looks stunning (if, perhaps, a little cluttered compared to the increasingly clean feel of GNOME). Unlike some people, I prefer using the official desktop distributions more or less intact and was pleased that to see that not too much customization had been going in. The only obvious change I noticed was that the KDE logo had been replaced with a SUSE logo.
SUSE provides a tool called YAST to configure those aspects of the system that are not managed by the desktop environment. It integrates into the KDE Control Panel under its own heading, and I could easily use it to finish my network configuration as well as specify an appropriate horizontal and vertical frequency range for my monitor in order to bump up my refresh rate. There is unfortunately some overlap between the configuration options offered by YAST and those offered by the KDE control panel itself and not always obvious where to turn. I am not sure what kind of hooks the KDE control panel provides for third parties, but I think this is an area that could use some improvement. Ideally, hardware options should be completely integrated into the existing KDE control applets.
I wanted to see if my network was up and running so I opened a terminal and tried to ping my Fedora Linux powered firewall, which worked flawlessly. KDE includes a terrific web browser which doubles as a file manager, whose rendering code Apple’s Sarafi browser is based on. I decided, however, to open the more versatile Firefox browser, installed by default. Unfortunately I found that I could not view any pages. I made sure that my name servers were entered correctly but still it would not work. I then SSH’ed into my firewall box to manually retrieve the IP addresses of a few websites and entered them into Firefox. Yet it still would not work! After a few confused minutes I realized I had forgotten to enter the gateway for my network. Having settled that the network worked fine, after YAST had automatically restarted it following my configuration changes. I made sure to download the available updates for my system, which was as easy as using Windows Update. The updates appeared to include a Macromedia Flash player, as well as an updated NVidia driver not provided by default due to licensing restrictions. I also installed my favourite Firefox extension, All-In-One gestures, to make navigation more comfortable. Its behaviour was flawless, and identical to when installed under Windows.
I launched OpenOffice, also included by default, and noticed how well it integrated with KDE unlike a few years ago. Everything looked native to KDE and very visually pleasing. I have since come to understand that OpenOffice rendering hooks are available for QT/KDE these days, which probably explains this behaviour. I also noticed quickly that the fonts displayed were anti-aliased, another item I had been experiencing some problems with in the past.
I was surprised and somewhat annoyed that clicking in an inactive textbox would not select all of its contents. This is a behaviour probably introduced by MacOS, and then carried on by Windows, and one that I had really grown used to. I thought at first that this problem might be specific to Firefox but it appeared to work the same across the board. Another annoyance that I had was that the icons, graphics and text were all quite large and consumed a lot of my valuable 1280×1024 screen real estate. I had become used to having a fair amount of space for my applications. I decided to try and bump up the resolution to 1600×1400, which was easily done with no need for meddling in configuration files. Unfortunately, everything still displayed just as large. I believe that this was due to my DPI setting not changing, but I could find no way to make this change using the graphical configuration tools so I let it go for the time being. I tried to enable dual-head options so that my second monitor would also kick in, but YAST claimed it was not available (despite working well under Windows). I am not certain what caused this and did not try further. I also did not try any software for my TV tuner card despite it having been accurately detected during the installation procedure.
I decided to have a quick peek at GNOME. The first thing that came to my mind was that it had detected and mounted my NTFS partitions, holding — among other things — all of my music in MP3 format. For some reason, these partitions did not appear to have been available under KDE (they probably were mounted, but it was not obvious to me at the time). I tried the default GNOME media player and my music played well, although there was no support for changing the volume using the additional keys on my Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro. I also challenged destiny by opening an XVid file, but got an expected error message. I imagine some codecs needed to be downloaded. Another observation I made while using GNOME is that every folder opens in a new window. This is something that I had vague collections about behing hyped on some sites using fancy terms such as “spatial nagivation” or something to that effect. This had always been the Amiga and Mac way of doing things, and I recall discomfort when switching to Windows 98 which normally opens folder contents in the existing window. To my surprise this old way of doing things re-introduced in GNOME really annoyed me, I can’t be bothered to go around and close windows all the time to avoid the inevitable clutter. Fortunately I quickly found a way to disable this in the settings.
During the course of experimenting with SUSE, I rebooted my machine several times for certain changes to take effect (it is likely that this was not strictly necessary). I noticed that sometimes this would not immediately appear to work; I sometimes had to select “Restart” multiple times before anything happened.
In summarizing my brief experience with SUSE thus far, I think it’s safe to say that it’s the most clean and polished Linux distribution that I’ve tried.
