Greetings,

I have been jumping around the LINUX distros in search of what works best for me. I have loaded and played with FEDORA, SLACKWARE, RED HAT, SUSE 9.2, and currently am exploring a load of the transitional MANDRIVA.

Anyway, of the distros I have played around with, RED HAT and SUSE9.2 come the closest to working as I would prefer. Between the 2, I have a little leaning towards the GUI of SUSE.

Since I'm considering making the investment in SUSE 9.3, I would like any opinions, comparison, or complaints about SUSE or RED HAT in general. I'm of the belief that one of those distros will be my "final solution".

Also, before the questions roll in:
1> I'm an experienced user.
2> The usage will be for home network, gaming, research and web design.
3> Amongst my goals is the desire to disentrench my wife and son from their Bill Gates dominated computing environment.

I appreciate any input.

Officially, Red Hat is not a desktop product. And they basically threw it to the wolves a couple of years ago. That's when I quit buying Red Hat for my desktop and switched when Novell bought out SUSE.

I'm primarily a web junkie and do some other Multimedia stuff and Networking so as far as your individual needs I can't comment on them specifically. I do like SuSE's interface. I find YaST to be a great tool, especially if you're going to try to convert less technically inclined people to make the switch. I would have to say on that point alone SuSE is probably your best pick. I do believe 9.3 will be released in the next couple weeks via FTP as well, but if you pay you get the documentation and support so that's a plus too.
I think you'll also find a larger user base to help solve problems you run into.

Thanks for your replies.

I think this confirms what I was leaning towards.

SuSE is an excellent distro, in my opinion. Based on your description of the machine's intended uses, I would consider SuSE to be a prime candidate. Redhat officially ended all support for Redhat v9 a long, long time ago, and I would not advise using it today (Fedora is its replacement)

The stock SuSE installation is very feature-rich, and additional packages (eg, mplayer) are available too. The Susewatcher app will check for updates, and YaST makes downloading and installing packages a breeze. Definitely give SuSE a tryout, and if you like it, I'd encourage you to purchase the retail copy (both to support SuSE as well as for the *excellent* documentation that is included)

In the end though, the only thing that matters is which distro you consider to be the best for your needs and preferences, and the only way to determine that is to do what you did -- try several, then decide for yourself which one is best. Good luck with it either way -- J.W.

SuSE 8.2 personal (retail box) was my introduction to the Linux kernel..

It is my opinion that any SuSE Distro is an enjoyable "out of the box" experience. Windows users can migrate right over to Linux (via SuSE) without missing a beat... KDE has all the bells and whistles a body needs to perform the ordinary tasks,
(multimedia, word processing, net crawling, E-mail etc.) And all the eye candy that windows users are accustomed to.

So far I've messed around with mandrake, Slackware, Debian, free-bsd, redhat, fedora core, dsl, yoper, SuSE and knoppix.
It has been my experience that SuSE is the most user friendly, the quality of the cd's is excellent, and ease of installation is 2nd to none. Yast is an excellent tool, updating is a breeze, I have no gripes with hardware support and I think SuSE is the best distro to show a windows user "The Light".

That being said, I think SuSE out of the box is a bit sluggish compared to Debian, Slack, or Yoper, whether a 2.4.x or 2.6.x kernel, but thank the Gods for open source so the "converted" winblos user will in time learn to customize their system so it fits them like a fine knitted sweater, and they'll have plenty of time to do it, because they won't have to waste time cleaning their system with spybot, ad-aware, make-a-fee or any of the other commercial ani-vir software, and all the other garbage that exploits active-x.

A rather long winded diatribe, not too sure if it fits in your post, and I think SuSE is an excellent choice. A pad, A pencil, A telephone, and a bunch of postage stamps is still a better alternative to windows xp and cheaper too !!
Good luck bringing your family into the sunlight.

Ok, first off - Try not to buy suse. It turns out that it is leagal to distribute, as long as you don't make any money off the deal. I scored my suse 9.2pro disks from a friend after learning we couldn't get in trouble. Try to do the same. Second, I like suse well enough but prefer slackware. It runs faster and you end up learning alot about your computer and linux by breaking out of the gui. It took me at least 2 months to become proficient in a command line, but it was worth it. Now I load fluxbox, and spend most my time in an aterm at that. No more sluggish KDE and KDM. If you want to be in a GUI all the time, go for SUSE. I would still recommend slack over everything because of the learning experience, and no yast. Yast drives me crazy now, but will work fine if you are happy with it controlling every aspect of everything. The problems occur when it doesn't control something, or can't.

Of all the all-in-one/packaged/full on GUI distros, Suse is my pick over FEDORA Core 3. Just say no to Madriva/Mandrake.

Following up on the other good comments.

1. Use what works for you and your hardware. I was a Mandrake dude from 6.1, 8.0, and 10 but gave up when I couldn't get good USB support. I found SuSE to be better with my hardware than M10.

2. SuSE is considered to be a bit "top heavy" and I notice this a bit on my machine (a two year old Athlon XP2400) but have absolutely no issues on my 60+ year old mother's machine, which is a three-month-old Monarch system with 2G RAM.

3. You'll find a huge amount of support and resources to make things easy on you, should you go with SuSE. SuSE pulls a lot of weight and having Novell behind it doesn't hurt.


HTH

Clearly Red Hat is not a choice for the home desktop for all the reasons stated. Again, as indicated, your choice here is Fedora. And, again as already stated, from Novell, it's Suse.

I have been using both Suse 9.3 Pro and Fedora Core 3 for similar use as you have plans for. It is such a difficult decision. Both distributions are excellent; however, Suse 9.3 Pro wins out in a few key and very important areas to me:

-- YaSt is an outstanding tool with excellent hardware detection and configuration, updating, and a breeze for a recent windows convert. Better than up2date, yum, apt-get, or smart in my opinion.

-- While the Fedora Community is very large, my experience is the Suse community support is just amazing. I have posted a number of issues to several forums and the Suse responses are knowledgable and timely (above and beyond my expectations). This is only my opinion based on experience to date.

-- The Suse documentation is amazing.

All that said, I am going to install Fedora Core 4 and check it out after the release date on Monday!

Good Luck!

No - I disagree with this comment very strongly. Personally, my view is that it is perfectly OK to download a given distro when you're in the evaluation phase and you're deciding whether or not you want to use it, but once you decide that a particular distro is the right one for you, and you start using it on a regular basis, *please* support it by buying the next release. Believe it or not, the people who build and maintain that distro have bills to pay themselves, and it's only fair that if you are using and enjoying the fruits of their labors, that you at least toss a few bucks their way. Think about it - if the people who produced a distro never received any financial support at all, chances are pretty good that sooner or later that distro would become extinct, for the same reason that I doubt you'd be willing to spend countless hours working on a distro, responding to bug reports, maintaining and paying for a website, writing documentation, etc, etc, all for absolutely nothing in return.

I recognize that some folks may have limited budgets, but at the same time, please don't actively discourage anyone from buying a retail copy of a distro -- the only result would be that you'd hurt the distro you claim to support. Thanks. -- J.W.

I see what you mean, and have actually supoorted slackware by buying the cd from then. It's not that I'm denying people support, but I did not want their tech support and was only touching base with suse to try to find the distro that was right. (I bought suse 9.0pro back in the day and was dissapointed) I only said that because I would not use suse, I found that I only liked it breifly and that you would probably outgrow it too.

I tried suse, I went with slackware, I *bought*slackware to support them.
Sorry for the mix-up, I'm not against supporting people working on projects in any way! -Bill

I found this in another post - a good fast HTTP DL of all 5 Cds
http://vlad.econ.msu.ru/SUSE-9.3/

do you know a site with the 9.3 amd 64 bit version on?

I was about to ask... this is the 32 bit right?

Yep, standard 32 bit...