I have read all three pages of this thread with interest concerning Suse
9.2. A lot of pro's and cons. Currently I am using 9.1 Pro and have been
considering the upgrade to 9.2. I am still going to do the upgrade.
Not being much of a computer expert I am guessing that a lot of the
trouble experienced with 9.2 are stemming from hardware and partitioning problems. It may have something to do with 9.2. I will soon find out.

Not here, you can rest assured

9.1 became quite stable after months of bug fixes. It might happen with 9.2 as well and that would explain what was wrong in the first place.

I bought my 9.2 professional in the box. After activation, I posted my first support question to their support site, I got a reply telling me that just because they read my message, there is no guarantee that they will reply to it. (so much for 60 days installation support). Now, on to other stuff:

Installing from the dvd is hopeless. It never does it right

You have to run the cd install more than once to get the things you want

On my laptop, if it configures both the eth0 and the wlan0, the wireless wont work. You get error message that DHCP is already running on eth0. Laptop is 5100 Inspiron by Dell.

The only way I can get the wireless to work is by deleting the eth0 device

Performance on the desktop (Dell Dimension 8200): After the first attempt to install got several error messages that certain packages did not install, although they were chosen and their dependencies were satisfied.

Very hard to configure Samba

Some good points: No problem with speed while loading -- Good support for Arabic and other RTL languages -- Instantly identified a networked printer from the desktop installation -- Hopeless from laptop.

CONCLUSION: If you want to test it, don't waste your money on the retail package.

SuSE would kick Ubuntu's a** in a fight...

Ubuntu is just the fashionable distro of the moment. Previously it was Arch. And even before it was Gentoo. But beyond the hype I can't see very much substance in Ubuntu.

I posted review of my experience with SuSE 9.2 Professional a week ago.
Inspite of my failure to perform installation on Desktop I still successfully managed to install it on "Compaq EVO 160" and it runs well. It is still not without splinters. Suse crew (new one) definitely dislike sourse based compiling on already installed system

I've just installed SuSE 9.2 on a fairly standard machine and it runs fine. Easiest install I have ever done, no doubt. However, I think that SuSE is *not* a beginner distro.

I had previously installed and dismissed both SuSE 8.1 and 9.0 - I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted, and I had no clue what was going on. I then moved to Slackware, and after a lot of pains I finally got "it". My Slackware is still running fine, I use it on my desktop and will stick to it.

Last week, I needed to set up a server quickly, so I gave SuSE 9.2 a try. Great, did as much as I could through YaST and did the rest through the command-line. A big time saver, if you know exactly what you are doing. A nightmare if you don't.

So I'd say that Slackware is a beginner distro - you are in control, nothing happens without you. Once you get the hang of it, you can easily manage SuSE and it will be a big time saver - but you need to be an advanced user.

All Linux's has its ups and downs, some people had problems with Susie 9.2 others didn't don't bash the software os, Remember Linux in general will never be completed fully in years time because there is soo many versions, soo many hardware to update, etc. +Plus Microsoft being a monopolist is making it even harder. All linux's are a little different and people have problems not just on this one but others. I never had problems with Susie 9.2 and its worked with all my new and old hardware. I have it installed on all 3 of my computers. The only negative thing is it tries to take over boot system but if you use !!Acronis!! you won't have this problem. Stop bashing something just because it doesn't work for you because it works for other people and non of the problems you said happened to me. Everyone has a different OS and not every hardware is going to be supported on all of them!!

As long as there is hundreds of companies out there making hardware for all sorts of stuff not all drivers can be caught up with and licenced and registered. Its just impossible to keep up with all of them...

Yoos guys scare me! I just jumped into the linux arena although I started with xenix in the mid 80’s and then to sco unix. I haven’t played with unix for a few years but most of my experience was plain vanilla scsi servers that would run for months, solid as a rock.

I’m jumping in the deep end, configuring an htpc and have ordered suse 9.2. Do any of you have any links or suggestions where to find initial set up issues such as raid arrays in linux? Thanks.

I've been a big fan of SuSE since 7.x up to 9.0. 9.1 when issued had a few too many bugs but they were fixed pretty quickly. I'd been testing 9.1 on a Toshiba Satellite 2450 and hit some issues that made it unusable - these were also there on 9.2. However, recently had to rebuild my production server (9.0 with Samba 2.2.8a as PDC) so took the plunge and went to 9.2 boxed retail set. I also set up a test server with 9.2. Ended up using new box for production server as no issues apart from sound card which isn't relevant for server; previous server became test server - I have a feeling that there may be some minor issues with that machine - nothing definite but need to investigate. 9.2 still won't work on laptop - main issue is the famous Toshiba keyboard bounce problem.

Therefore based on my experience a lot still depends on the hardware - my new machine installed faultlessly and was up and running as a PDC in hours - if that had been my only experience I would have been extremely puzzled by the comments in this thread.

However, the same sort of thing has happened to me with Windows - an old laptop is stuck with Me because the fan won't work properly in W2K and my Toshiba laptop which is dual boot W2K and SuSE 9.0 has had the wireless networking setup trashed by the latest Microsoft security update - I had to redo it using the Microsoft tools. As for XP SP2 .....

So on balance still fan of SuSE - hope Novell take a bit more care with new releases.

Switching from mandrake 10.0 to suse 9.2, about 3-4 weeks ago, i can say that the install went beautifully no errors, actually it went so smooth i didn't realize the distro was installing till it was too late.

I only started to run into problems the last week, but that was because I was installing rpm's and other things that weren't compiled for suse, printing will not work and a few other error messages keep popping up, but this is due to my messing around with it, and as this is just my test run before I do the real install, I know the final install will be great.

Switching from mandrake 10.0 to suse 9.2, about 3-4 weeks ago, i can say that the install went beautifully no errors, actually it went so smooth i didn't realize the distro was installing till it was too late.
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I found the best way to install SUSE is to do a manual install. It gives you better control
over settings and what exactly gets installed.

I had posted earlier some misgivings about Suse 9.2. After two installs things started working fine. I am sure it would have not been necessary to repeat installs--but I guess with newbies, who don't know much about working "under the hood" this radical solution is probably the only way. And if it does work the second or third time, I only know that it works, but not why. And hey, if it ain't broke, dont fix it.

I have been using linux the days of Redhat 6.0. I always expected it to be as idiot proof as Windows. A bad misconception. To get the most out of linux, you have to learn it. You have to spend hours of spare time reading and trying things out.

You also have to join the right mailing lists and/or join the appropriate forums. Don't go anywhere near the expert areas. They will scare you with their technical savvy. Start small, and go slowly. As the moderator has said, you dont learn it all in one day. It takes months.

Redhat has always been too rich for my blood. Mandrake I have found to be simple, but unfortunately their customer service is not up to paar. Suse and Mepis have great customer service.

I am now using Suse 9.2 on a dual boot on a desktop, as a guest operating system on a virtual machine on a Windows host, and also 9.1 on a virtual machine on winxp host.

They are all functioning great. I am very happy with Suse--because it does what I want it to do, given my technological shortcomings.

Ditto!
Personally I have even more reasons to dislike Mandrake, but that is another matter.