Hi,

No, thank you. I will not touch Windows any more. I have thrown it away forever.
I love Linux and even if it is a little slow in some cases, I think it is much better than any Windows.

Are those anything that someone can use without previous studies?
Slackware with FVWM, Fluxbox, Openbox, Windowmaker,

I needed something that I can use right away, without learning programming and using the shell and such. As I mentioned in my first post, I migrated to Linux from one day to another and I have never ever seen Linux before.
(My main business is not computing and I need to run my business rather than learn programming.)

Well, that's always the tradeoff between user friendliness and speed. Slackware is fast, stable, etc., but some consider it "harder" to learn (ie: very few GUIs for configuration, some learning may be needed). It's just a matter of finding a balance between all the factors like speed, user friendliness, etc. SuSE may work for you, but if you want "easy to use" I would also recommend Fedora Core or Ubuntu.
FVWM, Fluxbox, Openbox, and Windowmaker are just lightweight GUIs. As you said, you are using KDE, which is one of the heaviest (both on resources, and speed). It again depends on what your needs are. I'm very hotkey oriented, so I use Openbox with fbpanel.
If you just want Linux to "work", then you have to be ready for some tradeoffs. Take Windows for example, security and stability were a trade off for ease of use (plug in and it works) and "user friendliness".
I think a lot of this post was just repeating the same thing, so I'll stop now

icewm has a very shallow learning curve. I reccomend you try it.

the shell? well, you might need to go there someday, it makes things so MUCH easier.

titanium_geek

Congrats on sticking with Linux. An AMD Athlon XP 2800 is about 2.2 GHz, isn't it? I would think that nothing would take a minute to come up. I'm a newbie, so can't help all that much, but could something be configured wrong? Have you tried Thunderbird for your mail?

I'm surprised that your friend was able to get Win2k on that 400 MHz machine. I have a 450 MHz system that Win2k just refused to finish loading, it runs Slackware just fine, though.

F_M

I would say "Don't use Suse 9.x on an old computer with memory less as 256MB".
Suse is known for being slow on these types of hardware. Heck even Fedora/Redhat runs like a lazy snail going for home ..

Use a distro wich is lightweighted.. and see what happends...

Note: I do not say Suse 9.x series is a bad distro or something.. it's just not made for old hardware. Ditto for Fedora/Redhat.

You could always try using Vector Linux. It's Slackware based but includes some additional tools, and it's designed for older hardware. I briefly tried it on a AMD 450 MHz that I pieced together and it detected everything but my WinModem. It was also pretty fast and includes some additional WMs like IceWM and FluxBox.

F_M

Thank you for the advice!

I thought about Mandriva, as I read a lot of good things about it.
(Most user friendly etc)
I see, you have Mandrake too. Is that any different? Does that work on your 450's?

I'm using Slackware on my 450 MHz machine. I have different goals than many people. I'm a Windows administrator by trade. I've gotten bored with Windows and wanted to learn Linux on my own. So I tried a couple distros and did some homework. I came up with Slackware since it's the most UNIX-like, and since everything can be done at the command line. Since I'm from the MS-DOS group, I figured the best way for me to learn was at the command line. I really want to learn and understand linux and how it works.

I've also used Vector on this system. It worked fine, but it was 4.3 not the current Vector 5.0. I tried a couple others, but they were all too slow on that system.

F_M