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| > news > press > press room |
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| News Brief |
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| REVIEW: SUSE Linux 8.1 | ||||
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10/09/2002 — Wow. Your jaded reviewer is seldom at a loss for words, most of them regrettably unprintable, when trying to coerce a new piece of software into behaving properly. Happily, this time he's at a loss for an entirely different reason. Quite simply, this is the first Linux distribution he's seen that passes the grandmother test *and* does so without having been lobotomized first. The grandmother test is simple: could you put it on a PC in front of your 75-year-old grandmother, who has never seen anything except Windows, and expect her to use it? The lobotomy test comes next: it may have been made grandmother-friendly, but did they do so by removing all the features that make it power-user-friendly? First, the installation process. On reasonable hardware, SUSE 8.1 installs like a dream. It's easier than Apple's OS/X. (Unreasonable hardware may present obstacles, but this isn't a hacker distribution.) On the test PC, it autodetected the sound card, video card, spare SCSI disks and tape drive, modem, network card, and correctly worked out how to grab a network address from the DHCP server. The only reservation is that if you tailor the software to install, you'll have to grapple with SUSE's package manager -- essential, because there are over 5000 packages in the 7 CD/1 DVD set. Secondly, in use. SUSE have done a lot of work on their default desktop. You can choose vanilla KDE 3.0.1 or GNOME 2.0, or another window manager, but if you follow SUSE's preferences you come up with a slickly integrated desktop based on KDE. Double-click on an Excel spreadsheet, and OpenOffice's sheet component opens it up. Click on an unknown file type and it'll ask you which application to use -- and give you the opportunity of registering it for future use. There's extensive multimedia support, including support for TV cards and running Windows applications via WINE. There's also the usual kitchen-sink load of servers under the hood, a point-and-click firewall configurator in the control panel, and so on. But the real revelation is that the graphical environment is so well integrated that even an old command line user like your reviewer ended up using the mouse: everything just *works*. SHOPPER RATING: 5.0/5.0 PROS: Totally together environment that for the first time is truly able to go head-to-head with Windows XP and MacOS/X on the desktop CONS: Could use some more (and nicer) fonts Press Contact: |
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