Hey gang.
I’ve been a linux user since '96 - when I got my “6 Pack” of Linux CDs from LinuxMall.
You got six CDs with various Distros of linux - IIRC, mine had RH4, OpenLinux, Debian potato, slackware, one that is LONG gone (can’t even recall the name now) and of course, SuSE.
(remember when it was SuSE and not Suse/Novell/OpenSUSE?)
Over the years, I’ve dabbled w/ many other distros.
…I loved the ‘tweaking’ that Gentoo required to build a system that was tight and optimized for my machine. But that grew old. Fast. I just wanted a distro to “work” without too much fuss.
Enter Mandrake, Suse, Mepis and Ubuntu, etc.
Over the last year or so, I’ve used Ubuntu almost exclusively (started with Dapper, tried other distros here and there), but with the debut of OpenSUSE 11, I thought I’d check it out.
I have to say, I’m very pleased and impressed.
My Linksys wireless card (a WPC11v4) worked out of the box, unlike Ubuntu, which required the installation of ndiswrapper and a search thru many unlabeled CDs for the wpc drivers!
YaST(2) is awesome. It’s definitely matured to an excellent management system over the years.
After running Ubuntu (and all its variants) side by side w/ Suse, I’ve decided to make SuSE my new baby.
As an aside, I haven’t run Windows - willingly - since I accidentally (well, I still wonder if subconsciously it wasn’t an accident) wiped out my windows install on that old Compaq during my install of RH4 and had to learn “The Linux Way” the Hard Way.
With virtualization (thank you QEMU/Virtualbox) I keep Windows around solely for Family & Friends Tech Support.
Hoping I can contribute something to others with my “enduser” and moderate-to-kind of advanced experience w/ Linux here in the forums (I know my way around the CLI & can whip up a bash script to do what I need w/ the help of man pages and have recovered from serious self-inflicted b0rkings of my system.