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Customer Rating: - ! ! ! SuSE fanatic ! ! !
While back I was having lots of trouble with My win2k pro especally when I rebuilt My systems to 64 bit.

Red Hat handled it but I didnt like the rpm Linux to much and found Myself trying to go back to windows which had a problem supporting 64 bit so I started looking towards maybe trying out Debian untill a good friend/tech talked Me into giving SuSE 9.1 Pro a try.

While windows can support 64 bit in xp I knew I wouldnt run xp, thats a story in itself...

I was alittle skeptical at first but soon as I recieved My box set, and installed it I immediatly fell in love and wont even consider another OS... If amazon.com wasnt limiting I would give SuSE Pro more then 5 stars easily!

Once I installed, I was surprised to find I didnt miss one thing that windows offered, actually to My surprise was even better then what windows had to offer such as Vim and Kwrite over note pad and word pad for My programming and coding.

Im not sure if Red Hat comes with it now, but My SuSE 9.1 Pro came with not only Gaim, but Kopete which I like so much better then msn messanger including with msn plus added, Kopete just blows msn messenger/w plus away, userability, functionally, etc and seems to handle connect times much better too then msn messenger. Logs right in with no problems =)

Also came with many many other messangers to choose from which you can log in to msn, yahoo, aim, icq and jabber along with a big list of irc chat clients to choose from such as the new x-chat, Ksirc, KVirc 3, GnomeICU messenger for icq/aol, Konversation, Gabber etc... But I stick with Kopete and X-chat...

I also noticed the Netscape browser that came with My SuSE was so much better then the netscape for windows. It seems to handle plug ins so much better, actually accepts more HTML then windows internet explorer and so far not one crash. I didnt care much for the windows netscape but I love the Linux version even better then Mozilla FireFox...

Kind of like x-chat I suppose, I didnt like the x-chat for windows at all, mirc is to exploitable which was why I wanted to stay away from it but it was very customisable, but the new x-chat for Linux thats packed with SuSE is awsome in KDE enviroment, and also very hackable to customise the source to build your own tools or add others, much like the [/a] in mirc but much nicer and goes thru the config files instead and also its not exploitable ;P

I seen 9.2 is out but Im going to stick with My 9.1 for awhile, Im really enjoying this and enjoy learning new things as well with My SuSE in an extreamly comfortable, kewl enviroment.

I will say this though, well... I do miss somethings from windows that I dont get with SuSE Linux, such as those nifty neat-o blue screens and all that way kewl down time, corrupted and/or missing files, constant error messages that dont explain a thing, one app crashing but forces you to crash your entire system, and lets not forget everybodies family fun fill adventure packed favorite... 3 thousand reboots a day =) ... NOT ! ! !

Power ov the Green Geco Lizard!

Enjoy B-)

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Customer Rating: - Good distro, but one major concern...
After using suse 9.1 for a while I have come to the conclusion that it is an excellent distro. But... beware the USB hotplugging functionality. It is virtually broken in 9.1. If you have or are using 9.0 where just about everything worked, and want to have easy USB key functionality, it is my recommendation that you don't even bother getting 9.1 and just wait until 9.2 or the Novell desktop hits the streets. I have tons of USB devices in the form of flash keys and a USB multi-media reader and I was appalled to find that they wouldn't work automatically. Suse appears to be ignoring the many unsatisfied users' cries for a resolution to this travesty as this kind of situation isn't covered in the 90-day or so installation support and they will just ignore your requests or just straight tell you "sorry, we can't help you." Frustrating, as everything (especially this) seemed to just work fine in SuSE 9.0. Countless forum trips and lengthy post after another from many knowledgeable fellow Suse users have not been able to cure it. The only way is to disable supermount and manually stick entries into the /etc/fstab file and hope your devices mount to the directories you specify. A big headache for those that want to just plug in their keys and go.

Consider this.

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Customer Rating: - Good one
I tried the live CD version to see if any hardware problems I would have. Only the sound card was an issue. The manufacturer only had a driver for RH 7.3. No problem got it mostly for the server functions and it is going on a spare PC. It has more packages than you can count.

http://www.suse.com/us/private/products/suse_linux/prof/packages_professional/index_group.html

http://www.suse.com/en/private/products/suse_linux/prof/winprice.html

I would use Partition Commander or System Commander to safely resize your windows partitions if you have no free partitions or drives. I have been in the Linux/Unix OSes for a year now and this works well. I have used Knoppix, Red Hat Enterprise Server, Fedora Core 2, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mandrake, and others. This had an easy install and has many things to get you up and running. I would recommend this for advanced OS users. If you just surf the Internet and play games this is not for you and you can stay with Windows and be ok. Being the best maybe not. But the real good secure OS are definitely harder to configure than this one.

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Customer Rating: - Does not install
Do not be fooled, you cannot even get this to
work unless you want to spend hours on user
forums and paying for support.