Alvida Suse

Suse had been my preferred linux distro for last three years. Though there were a lot of things I did not like, it was only distribution other than Fedora and Mandrake which had entire off-line RPM based installation kit. People who have grown up without internet or with dial-up network (whose optimal connection speed does not shoot above 128Kbps) will understand importance of having an offline installation kit. I usually find Suse much intuitive and easy than Fedora. But I should agree that I never had any opportunity to use Mandrake. But Suse had its drawbacks. I think their release cycle is slow and they for some reason do not distribute RPMs of a lot of popular softwares. In fact, I found that Suse RPMs are most defficult to get (if Novell themselves do not distribute them). And if you are using a x86_64... God bless you.

I had made up my mind to replace Suse with kubuntu but was being lazy to do so. The final nail in Suse's coffin came when I decided to update my Suse distribution including the kernel. I was expecteing graphics drivers and Alsa ro break (because I had custom-compiled them) but no that was not enough. My wireless lan (I was usinf ndiswrapper) collapsed. Despite reinstalling Alsa, Amarok kept crashing. And today evening,even my ethernet went down. It wasn't really a problem in Suse, but I had a scapegoat already infamous for previous crashes :-D

So finally my favourite distribution of three years was laid to rest. I installed kubuntu. The main reason being large user base (which just increased by one :-) ) and ease of updating and maintaining stuff.....

So here I am, writing this post from freshly installed kubuntu system. The most amazing thing about linux systems is if you just keep your /home and / on separate partitions, you can just keep changing the distros without affecting any of your personalize settings. I still do not understand why Windows does not allow to have "documents and settings" folder on separate partition. It will save Windows use a lot of trouble. Not that I care about it... Just a passing thought.

Alvida Suse...May your soul rest in peace....