SuSE Linux 8.2 Professional

Why go back to command line, it is pointless. When I use a workstation I do not want to open a shell window and type commands. That is why we have Windows, to point and click. Plus, no software is available for Linux, not unless you trust some hacker community off the internet...

Installation is a breeze, especially if you have a DVD drive and can use the two DVDs to install. I only have a CD drive, so I had to switch out the five CDs, but this is a minimal inconvenience. Installation is quick if you accept the "default" configuration, but if you're planning to scrutinize the list of packages (as I did), plan to spend at least half an hour just going through the list and deciding what to keep and what to leave (there's a TON of packages). Once you do this, the actual installation is quite fast. I did the install twice because on the first try I had YaST place the / partition on some free space on my first hard drive (/dev/hda) so I could use all of the second hard drive (/dev/hdb) for /home and swap. The resulting system ended up being VERY slow, and I'm not sure why. So I re-installed everything onto /dev/hdb, and it works fine.

SuSE has put a lot of thought into its distro, and it really is worth every penny. It looks slick (I used to be a GNOME follower, but I am thoroughly happy with KDE 3.1), and it performs just as well as it looks. I particularly like how well the automount works, something I could never quite get right in RedHat. When I log in now, not only does SuSE automatically recognize all of my Linux drives, it also automounts all of my Windows drives as well. Maybe RedHat 9 does this well, but I could never make the previous versions work.

Of course, as with any Linux distro, your mileage will vary according to your hardware. But for my 3-year-old system, SuSE has turned out to be an excellent purchase.

Once installed, I found SuSE very easy to use. Its a far cry from the old days when you had to spend hours just to get basic programs installed and up and running. You do need to know a few basic *NIX skills like such as creating directories, changing permissions and group assignments, untarring/unzipping files, etc. but if you know these you'll be fine.

The default KDE is a great desktop and is easy to use. Its not quite as easy as win2k, but very close. Most programs that are available on win2k are available for linux, but there are many more available for linux that are not available for win2k (and most are free for linux).

Using YAST2, you can easily install programs that come with SuSe: just search for the package you want to install, click on the checkbox, and then install it. It will tell you what CD(s) to put in, and then you're off. The online updates for security patches, etc. worked just fine. I did download the newer Mozilla 1.4 and Netscape 7.1 browsers off the web, and found they worked flawlessly at the many sites I visited (including commerical sites and banking sites).

The bottom line is that I found SuSE 8.2 almost as easy to use as Windows 2000, but with far more capability. Given the great programs like Star Office now available for linux, I find little reason to use ms windows these days. And I don't have to worry about all those viruses and nasty windows security problems that seem to pop up all the time with ms products.

I would like to point out that whether linux works for a person or not depends on what hardware is being used (most linux problems are driver problems), so try to use common/widely available hardware when possible. Probably the people that give bad reviews here had some of this incompatible hardware.Also, there are still many programs that will run only in windows, and if you're one of those people who must use those programs, then you better stick with windows. You can run some windows programs on linux using WINE and VMWare, so you might want to test and see if that works for you.