SuSE 10.1: 10 plus 1 problems

I won't say I'm very satisfied about SuSE 10.1. The good old days of SuSE are behind us since Novell bought it. SuSE 10.0 was very polished to proved the Novell didn't intend to change SuSE but now --apparently-- they care more about something else than their image.

Well, their is one thing that I like about SuSE 10.1, that's Xorg 6.9. Something happened to the fonts. They are wonderful! Crisp, clear and evenly spaced. The change is obvious, everywhere! That's the only thing I really enjoy.

Apart from that, my update was a long list of problems. YaST crashed 3 times during the installation. That's the first time in my entire Linux life that YaST crashes. (I entered Linux world with SuSE 6.2.) And I won't mention the numerous restart of the whole update I had to undergo! That effing Mesa package is corrupted on the CD and that was an effing nightmare to track down every package that relies on it. I ended up in installing while ignoring any dependency to Mesa... and I'll have to wait for the RPMs to be available somewhere to be able to play to UT again.

The worst thing is that the update broke my KDE 3.5.2 because it installed the KDE libs 3.5.1 despite I took a lot of time to prevent it from happening. The update just didn't respect all the boxes I checked. I had to launch GNOME for the second time in my entire life. No need to tell how lost I was. I fixed KDE and I could feel at home again. Well, only after I reset the window buttons to what I like: the closer alone on the left, away from all the others so I never click it by mistake. Come on! What was the use of changing my settings? I haven't found any reason yet.

The next big issue was the keyboard. There was something definitively wrong with it. The keyboard was in French but the accented letters didn't react and the AltGr key worked like another Alt key. My keyboard isn't a Logitech but that's how it's set in the xorg.conf because the few "multimedia" keys use the same keycodes and it works fine. But that wasn't good enough any more. I added a script in KDE Autostart folder to reset this setting and to define explicitely the volume control keys. But all this is completely stoopid because what the script does is to more or less confirm what's already set in xorg.conf. Another thing I had to fix.

The worst thing was that I couldn't compile Serenity's style anymore. This update sabotaged my config! All the installed devel libs were available on the CDs but... no, not all of them were updated. YaST preferred to simply remove one here and then. Maybe to keep me on my toes? ;-)

Your mileage may vary but I found this update the worst of the SuSE series. All my previous updates went like a breeze. This one was a P.I.T.A. Of course I managed to get everything in working order --except the Mesa libs-- but a noob would have pulled out all his hair.

Luckily there is this new wonderful antialiasing on screen that prevents me from downgrading back to 10.0. It even works with the few gnomish apps I use and that used to have ugly fonts in one way or another despite the fact I use the GTK-Qt engine.

Now I just need to take care of the Mesa libs and I'll be able to forget I ever update.