the corner office

As if my endless tinkering with Gentoo isn't enough (well...), I decided to shuffle a few partitions around and install SuSE Personal 9.1 on my machine as well. This one-disk SuSE distro won over Fedora Core 2 since I didn't have enough spare CD-Rs to cut the four FC2 isos to disk.

I was mightily impressed with the SuSE installation - it went off without a hitch. I had only two gripes: first, the installer chose a fairly high screen resolution (my old 17" doesn't really like more than 1024x768, and SuSE did the install at 1280x1024. Not a biggie though.) The second was the fact that the system required a reboot during installation. Admittedly, I just sat back and didn't need to touch anything, and the reboot worked fine, but I had a bit of flutter wondering if I needed to remove the CD, whether GRUB would behave, etc. A prominent dialog saying "I'm rebooting, RELAX AND DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING" wouldn't have been amiss.

I booted into SuSE and mucked around a little. My main motivation, to be honest, was to compare the performance and general "cohesiveness" to what I've built up with Gentoo. Needless to say, it all feels a little more opaque and further from the wire than Gentoo, but SuSE's hardware recognition, self-configuration and resulting "feel" is superb - miles ahead of the last version of SuSE I played with 2 years ago. But if I stick with SuSE, will I be admitting defeat with my built-just-for-me Gentoo install? Hmmm.

I'll play around with both a little longer.