I know some other commentators, in their official capacities, have played up Suse’s 10.1 OpenLinux release as if it were the greatest thing since pre-sliced bread. I’ve been playing around on it a bit, either in preperation for a PCBurn article or just as a server replacemenent for the old Dell quad Xeon box.
So I actually doffed the Dell for now and tossed up a 64bit AMD Sempron machine with 512MB of fast DDR, mediocre video for a display terminal, and a modest 400W power supply. It’s not high-end, but it is a modern server-class system.
And I’ve gotta say, I’m not impressed. As a Linux desktop the performance bogs as soon as I start doing anything. Forget about running the zen-installer.. it chews through (literally.. real memory not virtual) 133MB and starts reaming my swap before I kill it.
Using yast2 –install to grab packages isn’t much better, with that command causing the machine to lurch around for minutes before finally deciding to install what’s requested… after spinning up every drive attached to the machine… regardless of weather I have CD/HDD local media that it’s set to install from.
The desktop works okay. But then again, so does every other Linux release out of beta. I do like some of SUSE’s utilities, and 10.0 was a very solid product, but as for 10.1 OpenSUSE so far I’m non-plussed.
Anyone else out there in userland have OpenSUSE experiences?
