After many years of trying out Linux distributions (mostly because of lack of support of something in one or the other, such as extensions in PHP5 or package management without sources), I finally found the holy grail.

This holy grail turns out to be the most natural (pun intended) of those distributions on the list--SuSE Linux!

Ever since installing SuSE 10.1 I have felt that I have been living in a cave using a distribution released only several years back--Mandrake 9.2. That's how overwhelmingly awesome it is.

The only drawback may be that disk space must be ample (10 GB is average) just for the operating system. Memory like that comes fairly cheap now though, so that shouldn't be a problem.

All of my devices were detected and configured. Yes, every single one of them, from both onboard and PCI ethernet, sound card, video card, usb drives, and parallel port printer. That was so unusual that I almost underwent an euphoria to understand how such could be possible.

As a conclusion to help all those distribution-watchers out there, here are some of SuSE's strong points:

Flexible

By flexible I mean it allows you to choose whether you want to use the graphical configuration utilities or modify configuration using a terminal manually. This works quite well, especially because the graphical configuration utilities are not dumbed down as are Windows', allowing variability.

I must mention though that I had to reinstall my kernel to get the parallel port working. At least that option was available through YaST. What a wonderful OS.

Suitable for Servers

SuSE is pretty high on security. It has a fully customizable firewall and with that a security-enhanced configuration for its Apache HTTPD and MySQL servers.

Reliable

You can always boot into SuSE using the CD used to install it, in case GRUB or something else wasn't configured right originally. This way the bootloader can be fixed.

Partitioning of hard drives works fairly smoothly. Only the root partition of a drive with many partitions can be formatted if desired.

Variability

The packages in SuSE are so widespread that it could take almost an hour or two to choose which ones to keep. Fortunately I had that time and it turns out that they all work just great.

So there's my experience. I hope it's convincing to some Linux aspirants (newbie seems to have a derogatory connotation).

Is there a way to take a screenshot of the whole desktop (not just one window)?

You can use ksnapshot to take the screenshot of the whole desktop.

i have been using fedora core5 for some time now. i was thinking of switching to debian, but this post makes me reconsider suse. but someone on this board told me to stay away from "bloated" distro's....

SuSE 10.1 is good. I have it on one machine. But, linux distros are like beautiful, classy women. You never want to settle for just one. You need some variety. Otherwise you get bored. SuSE 10.1 gets very boring, really quick. She is an easy lay. Guys want a distro that holds out a little, not one that gives everything up on the first date. Sure, if your desperate to get something done, and all the other girls have headaches, or you can't figure them out, rely on the old standby, SuSE, because she is the easiest.

That is true to some extent. SuSE does make some tasks way too easy. But my philosophy is that if one knows to do something the hard way and remembers it, then it is just fine to take the easy path and make modifications along the way as necessary.

SuSE is very stable and thus I think I'll stick with it for a long time.

I've been using SuSE for a while started on 9.1 and now on 10.1

I think it's great. Fortunately it was my first distro after windows and made the transition very smooth. Only little niggles that allowed me to learn Linux by solving them but not being too difficult as to make me give up and go back.

I think SuSE has a very important role as it may be the key to luring over the 'unclean'

I have tried distro after distro, and i have to say SuSE is the most successful so far. I am now using it on my clunky old dell latitude laptop with wireless. it all works.

The Down Side?

SuSE, is going the way of microsoft. With Novell running the show now, they have taken Linux away from the open source concept, and only offering some products to those who pay. That goes against the whole concept of what linux was all about.

It is bloated, but then it supports pretty much all of the common WINDOWS hardware, which is what most retailers sell these days.