I have no experience with linux, but plenty of perseverance. I have installed openSUSE 13.2 and KDE on a 1gb ram, 32bit compaq with a nvidia g card.
I followed the example on www.howtoforge website - ‘The Perfect Desktop’… So I downloaded openSUSE via bttorrent, burnt a DVD with cd burner XP. After 7 attempts at installing with gnome selected I tried it with KDE selected. Now at least a boot process runs, I can now select opensuse at boot stage (or windows XP)but can only do this if I have the DVD in the drive. the screen goes black, a list scrolls down, really quickly. On that list I can see a red warning on one line, something about ‘kernel’ ???. When booting is complete I get a green graphic wallpaper, a box with ‘office’ ‘firefox’ and a few others. A little tab at the top ‘desktop’ HOWEVER, everytime I click on anything i get a smudged block with half smudged text (unreadable). Clicking on the ‘desktop’ tag drops down a list, but this list disapears quicker that jack frost! It is unusable. I know I have a very steep learning curve in front of me, but I am determined to do it and make it work. Please help or point me in a direction of hope! Thank you so much. Jon
What video card??
Hi, thanks for asking, it says its a GeForce 7300 LE. Do you think I need an opensuse driver?
No, you rather need the nvidia driver… 
See SDB:NVIDIA drivers - openSUSE Wiki
You are not the first one having issues when using nouveau (the open source driver included in openSUSE) on this particular card IIRC, especially with openSUSE 13.2.
1GiB of RAM is quite low nowadays though. You might want to consider a “lighter” desktop than KDE4 or “upgrade” your RAM.
Although, if you don’t use Akonadi/KDEPIM, KDE4 should be fine as well.
But then, LibreOffice and Firefox are real memory hogs too…
yes - default nouveau drivers are having problems with some mid-old hardware like yours.
if you can switch to console (strg+alt+F1) use user root and password from installation, you should be able to launch “yast” + software.
There you should search for noveau an remove whatever you find (only libdrm* will stay due to dependencies). After having those removed you should be able to reboot (in vesa or fb-driver-mode) and set up your system with nvidia-drivers as described before.
before proceeding you should think about reinstall taking xfce or lxde instead of kde/gnome. It can be selected during installation in the same screen using “alternative desktops” (or how it is called). Those desktops should do well on your hw, offering same basic funtions but not beeing that polished like gnome/kde are.
Thank you Wolfi323 and Obel1x for your help. Anything technical that you said went right over my head. Hopefully it will make sense to me one day. I decided to try the easy option and lower my expectations. I re installed openSUSE with Xfce. It looks like it has worked. I can see things, they open when I click on them. A huge step forward from where I was. Now I just need to find where everything is and what it does. It feels nice to be on route away from Microsoft. Thanks again. Jon