Support, box, bloody big manual.

Right, SuSe is distributed by Novell. Novell provides customer support, as well as (I think) some of the non-free stuff like Java, etc. Since they have to pay licensing fees for that, they pass that fee on to the consumer. They are also trying to make money, hence the charge. You can download SuSe for free(www.opensuse.org), but there won't be support or anything else(you'd have to get that elsewhere).

I could always get support here =) :P

Yeah im going to try that live cd that I will get threw the mail and I will reply back and tell yall how i like it, and if theres any problems

:sigh: Why does everybody seem to think that you have to pay for Mandriva?
*That's* also what you get if you pay for Mandriva. They post a free version of the OS about a month after the "non-free" version is released. The only difference is the paid-for versions have some additional proprietary/commercial apps, and the ATI/NVidea drivers are pre-installed. If you can type http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ into your browser, you can get everything you need. And all for only the cost of your internet connection.

On-Topic: Mandriva, Suse, Ubuntu ... any of these will help get you along the road to where you want to be.

If you are really wanting to try linux soon, you may want to download the live cd yourself. While it is nice of them to provide the cd's and shipping for free, and you will most likely get several discs of it, it generally takes them a long while to get to you. Never ordered them myself so I dont know for sure but this is what I have heard.

The poster I was replying to only mentioned SUSE.

I can confirm this.

I used to use Cedega to play Counter-Strike 1.6 and Source. Steam took a bit to get up and running. Once up, it worked fine for 1.6 and CZ, but performance in Source games was a bit lower when emulating rather than running it natively. My computer is a piece of junk though, so you may not have any problems. Linux is a great operating system, but you may want to keep an old version of Windows around for gaming.

what if I could use both? like restart my computer to play games on Windows then do rest of my stuff on Linux? would that work? or would I need like 2 HD's?

Yes, you can have both of them on one machine and just switch between them. You could have both on one hard drive or 2 seperate hard drives, one for each OS. I recommend you go for 2 hard drives, as it is less work in the long run.

Mate of mine used to have his own clan on counter-strike but don't know if its been ported to Linux. Doom has i think so we must be getting there.

Distro wise to save you a lot of time and make life easy i
would say for a person new to Linux try out PCLinuxOS.As already said its one of the free live downloads. You can always branch of later and try what ever distro you like.

Thats the thing with Linux, lots of choice and freedom to do so.Unlike a certain lot of bastards bent on licence lock in and do as i say or else.

Oops sorry about the rant. But then again i'm not.

rofl? yeah Im prolly going to buy an extra HD anyways be a good hobbie on the side or something

SUSE is been known to support more wider range of hardware than Fedora / Redhat . It includes many propietry/legacy/closed source driver which can not be found in nay other DISTRO.





OpenSUSE 10 is freely available , try a search on Googly . Download the 5 .iso and burn it on CD and Install , and you are done.

You will enjoy the setup as it will detect almost all hardware automatically, even it'll add entry to fstab for all the WINDOWS Partition , will show icon for USBdrive dynamically and many more.

It even includes a own control panel like windows, so you can set up various hardware / software related settings .

I have tried many distro such as Fedora core , Redhat enterprise etc. but got amazed with SUSE for many Windows like features . I liked it.

Best of luck.

If I understand correctly, OpenSUSE doesn't have the proprietary/closed source drivers that SUSE does. Novell opened up the SUSE code, but can't include those drivers due to the fact that they are not open source. I believe this is also the reason they charge for SUSE, because they have licensed these drivers(and Java, etc.) and include it in their distro.

Some of the "payed" versions also include non-open source software. Like Java and others. But like what was said early, you pay for support too. For each of the payed versions there is also a free version. Like Open-SUSE or Mandriva-Free. Infact on ditrowatch today they posted links for Mandriva-Free (3 iso download).

And if you don't have a burning app for the iso's in windows try deepburner. They have a free version that works well. I think some linux distro recommended it to me and I love it.

http://www.deepburner.com/?r=download

Right now I'm using Ubuntu but I have yet to game on it. But I have heard of people playing CS on linux. But I also heard people have issues with CS Source and Steam. You might want to look into that.

Some other games have linux support like Doom 3. If you bought the Win version they will give you the linux installer. This may be the same for Quake 4. Also Americas Army has a linux installer.

Good Luck!

just a thought but is counter strike made by ID games. if so they always release linux binaries for all their games