[KLUG Advocacy] Impressions of SuSe 10

[Adam Tauno Williams]

Impressions Of SuSe 10

	I performed an in-place *upgrade* from SuSe 9.3 to SuSe 10 today.  I
never do upgrades as they haven't ever ended well in the past, but SuSe
9.3 had become terminally confused about what hardware was attached to
my laptop.  This wasn't SuSe fault;  there was a fire, during which my
laptop was running and became packed with and covered in a truly amazing
about of soot and ash.  At first the laptop would boot and was OK, but
would shut down after awhile due to overheating.  So I used an
air-compressor to blow out the little air intake.... and managed to
cover myself in soot (again!).  After the purging however the network
interfaces vanished and the USB wouldn't recognize any devices anymore.
It seemed as though everything was OK physically but that the software
had just gotten confused [ you get a feel for these things after farting
around with them for a decade :) ].... so I figured I didn't have much
to loose in trying an upgrade.

The Upgrade:
	The actual upgrade process proceeded with only one glitch - it couldn't
read the glibc-locale package from the DVD.  Of course my CD/DVD lens
could be covered with crap so I'm not faulting Novell (yet).  But every
other package installed, and on-line update happily loaded a more recent
version of glibc-locale anyway.  The laptop rebooted and there was my
network interfaces (ethernet & wireless) and all my USB devices.
Yipeee!  I can use a real keyboard again.

The Desktop:
	All my preferences and application shortcuts remained intact.  Only
evolution wouldn't run because the SuSe 9.3 shortcut pointed to
"evolution-2.2" for some reason, editing that to be just "evolution" got
me back in to the world's greatest e-mail & PIM client.  Beagle & D-BUS
seem to be on by default now, and Beagle searches without crashing.  The
SuSeWatcher applet actually started in the notification tray instead of
floating around on the desktop (as in 9.3).  
	Under "Desktop/Gnome Control Center" are some icons I don't remember
bieng there before: "Printers", "Removable Drives and Media", and
"Search & Indexing".  Printers is a shortcut to the gnome-cups-manager
which is very handy, 'R.D.&M.' lets you customize how the desktop
responds to removable media, and 'S&I' is used to configure where Beagle
does or more importantly does *not* search.  So if you have projects
under NDA you can tell Beagle not to search those folders so stuff
doesn't just flit up onto your screen when your in front of a whole
bunch of people.
	The hideous and confusing xlock/screensaver-lock is gone... finally.
It is replaced by an intuitive GTK unlock widget that displays the count
down in a manner that makes it clear that it is in fact a count down.
	Multimedia is still horked up.  The Totem movie player is effectively
useless as it doesn't support any of the codec in common use;  so it is
off it re-install mplayer which was uninstalled by the upgrade.  But the
GNOME PDF viewer seems much improved, it actually renders all the PDFs I
tried - which is a first;  and the PDF previewing in nautilus works well
and is very useful.
	The Planner (Gannt) application now support E-D-S which means you
Evolution tasks and contacts can be used directly in project management
- finally something resembling integration instead of re-invention.
That is pretty exciting stuff.

The Big One:
	There is one clearly outstanding difference between SuSe 9.3 and SuSe
10: speed.  Someone really lit a fire under this thing,  the interface
is dramatically faster and more responsive.  This is noticeable
immediately,  everything is faster.  It feels like just got a new
laptop.

Overall SuSe 10 is really nothing revolutionary but certainly sports far
more polish and chrome than 9.3 did.  Maybe we just have a solid enough
foundation that we don't need "revolutionary" anymore?