Heratech

I am back using Ubuntu 9.10 x64 (Karmic Koala). I tried to use Suse 11.2 for a week but in the end I just couldn't. Suse is normally so polished but this release felt half-baked.

Ubuntu is just so much faster to do things in. Faster to update. Faster to install packages. Faster to find packages because of the bigger community/repositories. Things that would take minutes and lots of clicking in Suse's Webpin/Yast gui thingymajig take seconds with a sudo apt-get install.

Also does Suse even have mirrors? Downloading packages from them took hours and I could'nt find an easy way to set a mirror.
Another thing that worried me was that to get software I quite often had to install from locations that I didn't fully trust- repositories created by users that are on the suse site but I don't know how much checking they receive.

My wireless on Suse also felt buggy and my dmesg logs were full of weird messages about it that could not be explained by a quick google-perhaps another sign of a smaller community.

Suse did some things very well: Beautiful installer, pretty default theme, sound worked great out of the box, nice choice of default graphical effects when enabled.
The main bad points were: terrible menu by default, terrible 'traditional' menu layout, package management still sucks and a smaller community than Ubuntu.

Perhaps if I had used the full DVD install things would have been better? Or perhaps if I had used the KDE live install?
I will try Suse again in a year and hope things have changed. Until then back to the wonderful, easy, quick world of Ubuntu (and its ugly default theme).