I was given a copy of SUSE 9.3 Professional by a friend who’d received it as an unwanted gift. Spurred on via the guy who prefers SUSE over OS X Tiger, I mainly wanted to try it because of the easy availability of Mono packages for it.
Now my machine is no speed demon – it’s a classic Athlon 800 Mhz with 512MB RAM and a NVIDIA Ti4600 graphics card but it runs Ubuntu with no issues. On this machine, an Ubuntu install (with patches) takes between 30mins to an hour. SUSE (with patches) was pushing 2½ to 3 hours! This was about a 50/50 split install to patches (Ubuntu is probably more like 70/30), but the real shock was the patching process. apt-get dist-upgrade on Ubuntu is a split of roughly 50/50 for downloading and installing the patches. On SUSE this was more like 30/70 or even 20/80. I kept thinking it was hung!
Once I’d got SUSE installed, patched and running, I quickly came to realise how slow it is. I don’t know what it was doing but booting took at least twice as long as Ubuntu, and it was far from responsive whilst running. YaST was by far the worst culprit of this.
Getting back to my main reason for trying SUSE – Mono – I was disappointed to find that it is not easy – you need a separate update tool. To top it all off, you can’t even download the tool (As linked from the Mono download page) at the moment.
SUSE has now been wiped from my machine, and the media returned to its original owner to find a new home for it, and I’m happy, back in Ubuntu.
I am semi-tempted (being as addicted to that new distro smell as I am) to give “Fedora Core 3”: another whirl, seeing as there are now ‘official’ Mono packages for it (which was one of my main reasons for dissing it last time).