[ijbreakey]

1.) As far as my understanding goes, openSUSE is the testing grounds for SLED. So openSUSE is more bleeding edge then SLED but is still stable. I've never used SLED so I can't speak of the quality of it, but I've never had problems with openSUSE on my laptop that haven't been an easy fix (wireless is the only thing that I need to do manually, and there are two rpm packages I need to install - easy.)

2.) Can't really answer that for anyone else. I own a laptop that I had windows vista on for college. At the beginning of one of my semesters Vista crashed and the IT dept wouldn't reinstall it unless I had my install disks, which I did not have. I found out about linux and read that openSUSE was a great distribution for beginners. I installed it with KDE 4.0 (yikes! I stuck with it throughout its development and now I can't imagine being without it! 4.3 is the future!) and have been in love with it ever since. I finally got my install disks and had my school's IT reinstall Vista but after tasting the freedom and flexibility linux gave me I decided to stick with it. Anything I've learned about computers I've learned from using linux. But I don't spend hours in front of my computer for more than just school work, socializing with friends, and listening to music (and showing off how easy to use it is to my friends).

I've installed it for a number of friends who also enjoy using linux in conjunction with windows. Some have started using openSUSE as their main OS as I have.

3.) If I had the opportunity to get a new desktop or laptop system with no budget limitations? I'd wait till windows 7 and opensuse 11.2 come out then get use both windows and linux, with openSUSE being my primary OS. I'd get a big enough hard drive to dual-boot. And I'd also go with an Nvidia graphics card. It would probably be partitioned like so:

/dev/sda1 NTFS Windows 7
/dev/sda2 NTFS Data partition
/dev/sda3 Extended
/dev/sda5 Swap
/dev/sda6 Ext 4 /
/dev/sda7 Ext 4 /home

(This is my setup now! Except I have vista instead of windows 7)

Of course if it were a desktop I'd get a separate hard drive for each operating system and then one hd just for data, but would still use openSUSE as my main OS.

I do not think it's stupid to buy new hardware. Look at Vista, many people had to buy a lot of extra hardware to get functionality out of it. I myself opted to upgrade my RAM just so my computer would speed up to how it was with XP. I bought a bigger hard drive so I could dual-boot openSUSE with windows Vista on my laptop and let me say openSUSE blows Vista out of the water with speed and conservation of memory resources.

There are my honest answers, but being still pretty new to linux (I joined this forum when I started with linux in January of this year!) you can take my views however you want.

Take Care,

Ian