Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, August 11th, 2006

I’m currently a SLED 10 user – and I’m unusually impressed.

Yep, I switched from Ubuntu to SLED 10 this week in my neverending tour of distros. The first thing that jumps out is Novell really made this a desktop distro (aka, not just slap a “Desktop” label on a server platform).

SLED 10 is by far the easiest to get XGL up and running. First, just open the menu, go to “Install Software” then install either your ATI or nVidia driver. Then open up the menu, go to “Control Panel” and under Look and Feel you will see “Desktop Effects” which is basically an XGL utility. Click “Enable Desktop Effects” and you’re all set. Novell even logs you out and restarts everything necessary to use XGL right away – no reboots. In that XGL utility you can also modify settings for XGL including setting it up to have 100 faces on the cube – what you’d want that for I don’t know, but you can set it to whatever you want.

My only real suggestion thus far in the user process is for Novell to get some agreement with ATI and nVidia to install the drivers during setup… not sure why they didn’t especially when you can access their repositories during install….

Beagle integration is very cool. However, I’ve noticed the scope of Beagle is only for searching files you have rights to – i.e. normal users can’t find ifconfig. Kindof annoying if you want that “one place to search” euphoria, but I understand clearly the security issues.

The new menu under “Computer” at first gives you the reaction of “oh no… they didn’t” and you get a sick feeling and pictures of Windows float through your head. Then you see… no, this is actually logical – this is more like Mac OS X.

Here’s my bold statement about SLED 10: This is the FIRST challenger to Windows. I feel qualified to say this b/c within the last 5 months I’ve used Fedora 5, OpenSUSE 10, Ubuntu 6.0.6.0, Gentoo 2006.0, SLES 9, Kororaa, Xandros, and RHEL 4 WS.

I’ve always been reluctant to suggest switching normal users from Windows to Linux – that’s changed. I’ve long felt engineers and “techies” should be using Linux – it’s easy for them to learn. However, there is undoubtedly a segment of everyday users perfectly ready for something like SLED 10. Novell’s right – “Your Linux is Ready”.

The time is now for desktop Linux to get started – I can feel it. SLED 10 may one day be called “the shot heard round the world”.
My sister asked me to find her a laptop before she goes to college – I think I’ll try an experiment – load SLES 10 and see what happens :)