sily newbie questions on SUSE versions
 

Hi All,

I am just now exploring Linux, and still very much a newbie. I have XP/PCLinuxOS/Ubuntu on my desktop, and working with Ubuntu the most.

I have a friend with a Novel SUSE, though not sure how old and what version. I have looked at the Novel site, but can not figure out what the difference between the version I would buy from Novel and the version I would download for free are. Are these two completely different distros? If my friends is a purchased copy, can he share it with me?

I thought I saw that SUSE came with KDE, am I correct? I have read a few times that even though you can run KDE or Gnome on any distro, that changing from what is native often can cause problems.

How would SUSE be for a laptop install?

Thanks for any help.

I like Suse but I'm biased, it was my first distro and I still mainly use it on my desktop, but run Mepis on my laptop because it is older and only has 256 meg of mem. Suse is one of the fattest distros I believe, but you do have a lot of choices on installation. To answer your second question, I can't honestly, I use free versions and lq for my support. Suse does come with Kde or Gnome, you select which one you want on install or can change later. As far as laptop goes if you have one of the newer ones with 512 mem and about 10 to 12 Gig of hd space try it, if you don't like it you can always delete it.

You have a choice during the installation whether to install KDE or GNOME or both. You shouldn't have a problem installing both and switching back and forth. There are some programs that need gnome libraries (such as pan) and some are kde based, so often you are running parts of both at once.

SuSE is a little bit on the heavy size. If this is an old laptop with a 2 GB hard drive, you might want to try a different distro. Even a text version install will need at least 1GB of disk space.