Back when I was in college, 8, 9 years ago, most of the guys I was hanging out with already used linux...and one of them gave me an account on his server. I knew how to use elm, and I knew how to irc, and that was it. This was non-GUI of course, and I liked the simplicity of things. And the speed.

Since then, I sporadically tried to switch to linux, but I always got stuck. I learned more and more about windows, just by using and tinkering with it, and although I'm by no means a guru, I know how to set up a system. I'm pretty much the "guy to call when your computer fails" for the entire neighborhood. After all, what's so hard about "help! when I start up the internet there's porn!"?

Still, linux proved to be almost unbeatable. Just "tinkering to find out how things work" almost always ended in disaster. Couple of months ago I installed Mandrake 9.2, but got stuck in dependency hell. Fedora 1 had apt, but after succesfully installing the OS and quite a lot of soft, I got stuck at configuring samba. Tinkered till the system simply refused to boot (don't ask). Back to Windows.

But now....ah, now I did it. Switched to SuSe 9.1 and yes, there were a few hiccups, and I devoted the best part of the last two weeks to it, but I have everything setup as I want it. Firefox, Thunderbird were easy, Apollon and Gaim proved a litte more difficult (in fact, gaim was pretty easy until it started crashing on me. I'm hoping a nice 0.80 rpm will solve this). Samba again proved to be most difficult, but I have it working now...file AND printer sharing.

Sound works, I worked around the xine legal issues, JuK is happily playing every mp3 on my wife's Win2K, and Krusader is a very nice file browser...I have everything I need. Not looking back. Here to stay.

Big thanks to everybody who helped me help myself.

San

Pat your back mate Bold move you made.

Cheers and enjoy your freedom.

Thanks It just feels like such a relief and accomplishment, since I've been trying to do this for a long long time. What held me back is that everything I learned of computers, I learned through windows. Had to think outside the box.

San

I believe that the road block taht people face is because of their unwillingness to see outside the box. That's the case with my friends. But every one moves out.

Cheers.

Outstanding!
Congratulations.

Wow, your the first fellow I've read that tried a bunch and found SuSE to be a winner!

Which is interesting because I was thinking of telling my local university guru to think about Slackware 10.0 instead of SuSE 9.1 (he's responsible for 300 systems on campus currently running *yuk* WinBlows), but he seems to really like SuSE... so thanks for your vote of confidence, I'm sure the SuSE people will appreciate that!

Congrats indeed & love live Linux!

- perry

to me, suse is like a hook distro and is somehting you grow out of after a couple weeks to move onto something a little better. i prefer mepis in almost every way. congrats on switching. i havent heard of many people switching from linux to windows so that can only mean we're growing.

Why I chose SuSe...It's a European thing I guess I'm sure I could get Mandrake to work just as easily, and I was seriously tempted by Xandros too (but decided against it because it ships with KDE 3.1, and software that's a bit outdated). I think I just liked the look and feel of Suse more than other distros.

Still, I dream of having a fully working gentoo PC, but since Suse is working out for me now, I'll wait a bit.

San

Go in for a dual boot system buddy. That way you won't happen to wait till you are bored of SUSE to move to gentoo

Ah yes, but I'm following the same logic now with XP and Suse If Suse doesn't work out, I can always fall back to XP (which, although I'm catching up, I still know more about).

And I still want XP on my PC, if for no other reason that my wife does not want to switch to linux, EVER. I have to keep practicing dealing with Windows issues.

As opposed, of course, to dealing with linux issues, which are something else entirely :P

San