SuSE 9.3, first impressions
I got SuSE (http://www.suse.com) 9.3 and installed it on my laptop. I was immediately
impressed with some of their changes.
It worked very well with the laptop and even fixed some of the issues
that were present on the earlier version (9.1).
It has support for the ALPS touchpad, full support of the suspend
feature (I can close the lid on the laptop and it quickly goes into
suspend mode. To unsuspend, simply press the power button, and it comes
back to where you left it, albeit not extremely quickly).
Also, the wireless, KInternet tool was activated by default. When I
move between locations, it picks up the wireless signal and connects
automagically.
Overall, it was great for the laptop. As an operating system as a
whole, however, I can't say that it's that much better than 9.2 that
you should go out and spend the money on it. If, however, you're not
into updating KDE (http://www.kde.org) yourself, it's worth it just to have KDE (http://www.kde.org) 3.4 out of
the box, with full support.
Openoffice.org 2.0 pre-release has some nice features, and Novell added
their own little splash screen, which is also great.
Beagle was a dud. I still can't get it to work. I just gave up.
They also mentioned that they had some new photo program.
I came to
find out that they were referring to Digikam for KDE (http://www.kde.org) and F-Spot for
Gnome (http://www.gnome.org). Well, F-Spot is not any good, in my opinion, and I already had
and use Digikam (I think it's better than most photo management
programs on other OSes).
Bottom line, if you have a laptop, you NEED SuSE (http://www.suse.com) 9.3. If you have a
desktop with 9.2, you might not want to bother. If you have a desktop
with any older version of SuSE (http://www.suse.com), another Linux (http://www.linux.org) distro, or Windows, you
should definitely consider SuSE (http://www.suse.com) 9.3.
