samuri.co.uk

Got my new laptop so I partition it and I’m just about to get Ubuntu which works well for me, when I think maybe I should try a new one. Always avoided SUSE since the last time I tried it they messed around with vim to make it hard to use and made cutting and pasting with the mouse as hard as possible (should be: select – right click pastes, everyone knows that).

SUSE comes out top in all the linux reviews so I download the DVD and install it. It all looks very nice and professional, installs with minimal effort, all very good.

Starts up for the first time, the Grub loader screen appears, SUSE is default, we’ll change that later but for the time being, off you go. My laptop dies. Oh, try again, dies again. Panic a bit and select windows next time, that’s fine. Had to do work then so waited till like now before I got chance to look at it again.

Try again, this time select SUSE safe option, that boots up OK. Login, again, all looks quite slick but then the real rot makes itself apparent. They’ve tried to make it cute. It’s like a fucking MAC. They have these little icons that hop up and down next to the mouse cursor, yeah, fun for two seconds. I’m sure you can turn them off but doing that would mean having to use something far more sinister and mind controlling… the menu system. Nothing is where you expect it to be, nothing is easy to find. There’s messages and alerts popping up all over the place, wireless goes up and down, up and down.

In terror I flick through the menus trying to find a terminal window, THERE! loads of terminal icons. I open it up (it’s like going into a starbucks, JUST GIVE ME A FUCKING COFFEE!!!), I choose one of the 17 options and hope it opens something I can use. YAY! I take a quick look at the logs, wireless is pissing about so I turn it off. Things calm down a bit but finding how to do ‘stuff’ is just horrible. I appreciate it’s just KDE and that it’s all configurable but I, (and I’m sure many others), do not want to have to do it.

I try to configure Grub to set windows as the default. Seems simple enough, YAST, change settings. Although YAST will no longer start. I check the logs again, no errors, just nothing. I mess about for an hour or so, make no progress with wireless (i’m a seasoned wireless-on-linux user and have been through the ball ache many times before so accept it’s not entirely SUSE’s fault)

Back to Ubuntu tomorrow. If I were a normal windows user, this would have stopped my Linux experiement in it’s tracks right there and then.

And they still don’t set up select-paste-with-right-mouse by default, what’s that about?