SUSE Linux 10.1 Screenshot Tour

An anonymous reader writes "Distrowatch reports - Following some eight months of testing, the openSUSE project has finally released the long-delayed and much-awaited SUSE Linux 10.1: 'After lot of work and several delays, we proudly announce the availability of SUSE Linux 10.1. As usual, we ship all the latest open source packages available at the time. We want to give special mention to Xgl for 3D acceleration on the desktop, NetworkManager for getting painless WiFi access everywhere, the completely open source AppArmor 2.0, and the full integration of Xen 3 in YaST.' OSDir has some great screenshots of the fresh SUSE Linux in the SUSE Linux 10.1 Screenshot Tour."

That blasted image viewer

[sl8r]

*WHEN* will osdir change their image viewer to something smarter? Loading all images again every time you select a new screenshot is kinda tedious, and probably adds to the strain on their server, what with all the times osdir's screenshot galleries get mentioned on /.

Add a JS image swap script, keep the current linking as it is (to appease the usability poo-flingers), and save bandwidth!

That said, Suse looks nice! :D

Re:That blasted image viewer

[k-sound]

If OSdir hosted all those screenshots just so we could all take a quick tour of some OS, yes that would be the way to go.

If however you want to do the above and , while doing so, make some money from advertising, you would make damn sure every view of a screenshot generates $blah banner views.

I've always found Suse to be a nice distro, but...

[QCompson]

is yast still slower than a one-legged turtle on ambien?

GNOME 2.12 !?

[slashjunkie]

It might have XGL eye candy, but it's running an outdated version of GNOME. Is SUSE still favouring their KDE heritage? It was Novell that sort of pushed GNOME upon SUSE when they bought them.

Re:Looks nice!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

what makes it all worth is that it apparently offers Exposé functionality.

Yup - that is the most immediately useful functionality!

But I disagree with you that Alpha transparency isn't useful - it's just that it's does not do anything useful in Windows.

Re:I've always wondered about SUSE,

[arkhan_jg]

SuSE was originally a packaged german-translation of slackware, but evolved into it's own commercial distro based in germany over time with a number of unique features such as YaST, the configuration and installation tool. I believe they also helped KDE development substantially, another german project. SuSE of course was bought out by Novell a couple of years ago (a US company), and is the basis for Novell's linux line these days. Since Novell also had ximian etc, SuSE stopped being a primarily KDE distro, and is now as much gnome as KDE. SUSE Linux is still a german based operation though I believe, with much of the same structure as when it was an independent company.

Novell are doing something similar to fedora with openSUSE, i.e. an opensource-only version that's community driven, with commercial/boxed retail versions being spun off that includes licenced and closed-source components such as codecs and java.

SuSE was my preferred distro for some time, but it was always a pain to update to newer app versions when they updated to a new version bump - the only way I found was to cough up for an upgrade DVD, or wait months for the free ftp version. Now they've got a truly open-source version (including a GPL YAST) with free updates as well as security patches, I've been looking at them again for boxes that don't need the configurability of gentoo.

Dissapointed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm becoming a little dissapointed with reviews like these where the main focus is on screenshots and the way the GUI looks. That always reminds me about the first wave of "Vista reviews" which went "A revolutionary 3D desktop interface" and somewhere further along the article would be some mentioning about the (IMO interesting) new security enhancements and all that.

In a way articles like these clearly show that Linux is getting to a level where people can indeed focus on looks and decide on that instead of worrying about issues like installing since that has been dumbed down tremendously. Linux is becoming more and more mainstream. Yet this also saddens me since I'm wondering if this also doesn't confuse more and more people that Linux is a graphical based OS instead of commandline. Oh well, I'm probably getting older, I yern for the days where we had wild articles describing these awesome new features called Xen and UML which had been embedded into SuSE Linux. That was also a major improvement not too long ago, and a clear signal that SuSE was following the Linux market and its new additions up close. But now....

Oh well, there's always Debian ;-)

Cumbersome Install

[Hellboy0101]

The fact that the install covers 23 screenshots should tell you that they need to seriously streamline it. Xandros takes a half a dozen mouse clicks, and it's done. PCLinuxOS (which I think is the best home user desktop distro) takes about the same. PC-BSD is very simple as well.

An install should consist of:
1. Create users.
2. Would like me to create the partitions for you? (offer an advanced feature as well)
3. Are you going to use DHCP, or a static address?
4. Would you like to review the software that is going to be installed?
5. Click next to complete.

That's it.

Those who created the OS should know the apps that 95% of computer users use. A web browser (with plugins pre-installed), an e-mail reader, multimedia apps, games, OpenOffice, and of course, the hardware correctly probed and installed. The security settings should be reasonable, and the first set of updates should be applied automatically.

Once the PC is up, take users to a Welcome screen, and ask if they would like to setup automatic updates, install additional software, and point them to an FAQ, or let them know how to get help.

Suse does many of these things right, but bombarding the user with so many questions during the install makes an intimidating first impression that turns users off.

Re:Multilingual background

[Morel]

That's the one, JDS 2, but I think the one I played with didn't have the black bars in the background, making it, as you say, more similar.

JDS was quite a disappointment for me. Over a year ago, we were testing it alongside RedHat and Gentoo and we were amazed at the lack of polish of JDS. I mean, a company with the size and expertise of Sun could very easily devote some effort to make its Linux distro not look like some half-finished college project. I wasn't surprised when they killed the project.

Cheers,

Morel

Re:That blasted image viewer

[sfraggle]

More fundamentally, when are they going to start providing _useful_ sets of screenshots for Operating Systems? It seems like every time a new OS comes out, osdir.com has a set of screenshots documenting every single step of the install process and every single menu of every single program that comes with the system. Come on, who actually needs to see this much detail? I'd much rather see a concise set of screenshots showing the interesting and unique features of the OS rather than this.