I have spent the last few weels trying to get the hardware in my computer to work properly or at all under SuSE Linux 8.2 (especially my ATI Radeon 9800XT) to no avail. My question is, if I bought or downloaded a Linux distro today, selecting a distribution for no other trait than compatibility with the newest hardware and ease of hardware installation, which one would you suggest?

Currently I think I might want to upgrade to SuSE 9.0 or buy Mandrake 10.0.

Alternatively, I could wait until SuSE 9.1 comes out on May 8th, but would this be much better than SuSE 9.0 already is or is not?

ATI Radeon's are a pain, regardless of distro. This is what I have read.
SuSE 9.0 can be a good test on whether SuSE 9.1 will be able to support your card. Of course, for the moment, makes no sense to buy the 9.0. You'd better wait for the 9.1.

SuSE 9.1 can be a bit better than 9.0, indeed. There's a kernel upgrade to 2.6.3, kde 3.2.2 and a few other nice upgrades.

Mdk10 is a good choice too, but if you already have suse installed... If I were you, I'd choose suse.

ATI Radeon 9800 is somewhat a beast, because of proprietary display drivers.
(All the graphics card manufacturers in the market at the moment all just as unethical and dishonest as their competitors. fsck them all.)

So it is not about the distribution, they can do very little with it. See ATI radeon HOWTO for setting it up.

At the present moment, I only have the minimum graphical system installed for suse because it takes less time time to install this after I ruin my computer trying to get drivers installed and kernel modules compiled.

I came across a few web sites that sell CDs of Mandrake 10 at decent prices so I might as well buy a copy of MDK 10 and try it out. Then buy suse 9.1 later this month if Mandrake doesn't help my situation.

I've always had a prob everytime i've tried SuSe, Currently using MDK 10.0 official cost $0.99 on ebay.. detects everything perfect.. I have a Radeon 9000 and have no prob good graphics, can watch movies full screen real clear.. I don't have the ATI software installed, so why try

Xandros 2 is a great start for people coming from Windows. Based on Debian (Sarge), kernel 2.4.x, and KDE 3.1.4, it did a better job of recognizing and configuring my hardware than SuSE 9.0 Pro or Fedora Core 1. It's essentially Corel Linux evolved...

That said, I use SuSE 9.0 Pro (Ximian Desktop 2, KDE 3.2.2) for my daily work.

Keith

try red hat, but i'm about to try fedora

I really want to get these graphics drivers running under Linux that would allow me to switch entirely over to Linux for word processing, programming, and now games. I now understand that the distro has very little to do with driver compatibility with it.

However, I bought a set of Mandrake 10.0 Official CDs and I will have to wait until the get through the mail to see if they make a difference. I certainly hope Mandrake 10.0 is worth the money