This definitely is not a general Linux thread, but if you read you comments in the post I replied to, it seems like you are generalising about Linux instead of being specific about Suse. Any person with some knowledge about Linux, knows that the Linux experience differs from distro to distro so if Suse has tonnes of bugs, regardless of how popular it is, they can move on to something else. Take a look at Mandriva as a case study, for years it was the most popular Linux distro, but once it became plagued by bugs and low qa, many people jumped ship and stopped recommending it to newbies. So if Suse gets it wrong, people will use something else since there are so many good linux distros to choose from.

Anyway we digress from the issue at hand.

Was already buggy in 10. It always wanted to reinstall the stock kernel over the new one containing security fixes.

I thought I'd be bedazled but far from it. I did an upgrade from 10 so at least I don't have too many settings to restore and my codecs should still work. But where 10 automagically sorted out the NVidia drivers, I'm back to the "init 3;sh NVidiainstaller -q" and so on. I mean, what was wrong with the previous method ?

10 spotted my ralink card, 10.1 doesn't even have the driver cause they wanted to replace the working one with an early days beta (experimental code) so they dropped it altogether.

Beagle is there by default but why didn't they replace KDE "Find" with it ? Or at least do a taskbar applet for Kerry ?

Otherwise, it feels solid and nice and it will probably be the distro that I tweak least because I want to do an upgrade again next time. Kudos for that cause it worked almost perfectly.

I initially thought 10.1 was going to be very good, however I've been trying to fix my display settings for a couple of days now. I have a Dell M781S 17" monitor which was detected fine by 9.3 and 10.0, but 10.1 doesn't. My screen size is way off, no matter what I try. Also, Online Update doesn't work, and the fonts are too small to be read on most pages. I've gone back to 9.3 which to me was rock solid. Will try again when 10.2 comes out.

Hey Kim.

I wouldn't necesarily say 10.1 is worse than 10, it's just a different set of problems. It's bizzare nothing that seems to get fixed stays fixed, even between minor versions. Give SUSE credit, at least the upgrade worked in 10. I lost count of the number of distros Mandrake went through before they got their update module working correctly.

SAX sucks. That just sums it up. If I just could have reset to a generic card and 640x480 to get the GUI working, it would have saved alot of typing but no. It "recognizes" a 7600XT but doesn't support it in any mode out of the box. That is just unacceptable.

There are some other minor things, but nothing I can't live with. It is just the frustration of it. They really have to get to grips with their hardware support. The problems I have encountered can't be blamed on the hardware vendors. The hardware worked fine in the previous version of the operating system!

From what I am reading here, I guess
I will pass on 10.1, and maybe a few more
versions beyond that, until they get it
right.

I have been a SuSE fan for two years now
and have boxed retail sets of 9.1 Pro, 9.2
Pro and 10.0. I think I will stick with
these for a while longer and start using
Xandros as well, even though Crossover
Office does run quite well with SuSE.

Point taken but as I said, if SUSE screws it up, it hurts Linux bigtime compared to other distros (even Ubuntu. Ever see Ubuntu on a store shelf?). It is fine for you and I to jump around distros, but if Linux is ever going to be more than a hobby for the few there is going to have to be a straightforward, easy to install and configure Linux distro. Right now that just doesn't exist at a level suitable for the masses and when a major Distro like SUSE screws it up, it DOES reflect on Linux in general whether we feel it is fair or not.

SuSE 10.1 is very good, except the programs are ridiculously unstable. It's unfortunate.

In general SuSE 10 is a dealbreaker, period. At this point I'm too committed to it to go back to 9.3 (yeah, yeah, yeah, shoulda done better backups to let me recover back to 9.3). When I heard Novell was going to get their hands on SuSE, my reaction was "there goes the neighborhood" and the 10.x misadventures seem to confirm that. I've disliked Novell since the days I used it for a real estate office client and for a charity's "development" (fund raiser) office and have generally avoided Novell products like grim death ever since. I wish I could say that my reactions to 10.x were just biased because of two bad (read "would up eating costs") installations in the bad old days of Windoze, but see my topic on the ens-1371 driver and SoundBlaster PCI legacy cards...

Frankly, if Ubuntu hadn't stepped on its necktie during a test install, I'd have dropped SuSE for good. But, hey, if the product can be rescued, I'm listening... just not holding my breath...

I'm with you RBE. Here's hoping, but this seems like deja vu. Mandrake all over again.

For those of you keeping count, add network printer recognition to the list. This one is a terminal problem for a distro that fancies itself for enterprise rollout.

Agreed, 10.0 worked fine, 10.1 is working like all the beta I tried, they are not working. 10.1 is a big disappointment

Check out mepis 6 beta 3, it is very fast and very stable. its using some of the ubuntu core, but hell, i can't istall ubuntu with its video problems

Except for the updater, which I've been bitching about since day one, I'm enjoying the heck out of 10.1. I'm doing the eval for work and it's much better from the server side than 10.0. Mainly all the 5.0s (mySQL, php,etc) integrate seamlessly. On the desktop front, even xgl is a pleasure with the GM as opposed to the RCs and one aborted attempt on 10.0. Except for previuosly noted, not much to complain about on two 32-bit and one 64-bit desktop and two servers at work.

Yeah, the updater is pretty much crap, but as an alternative, apt-get will work perfectly out of the box. I recall in 10.0 that you had to find the repositories, then add them to the list files.

Oh, there's another "used to work, now it doesn't": Samaba's printer sharing. I have a simple (ancient) LJ-5P which was fine under 9.3 (and before). Under 10.0...? Pfft! I did something to get it going (bad news when stuff starts working as if by magic - hard to repeat "magic spells"...) and then... pfft! No sharing for any obvious reason. Maybe the many WinXP updates did it, maybe not. It's a sad commentary on SuSE Linux when things act that way. Particularly with a rev number starting V10.x... When I was working with kernels in the 0.9.x range, this sort of thing was forgivable but now...? Feh!