To be honest, I have always been a “Windows geek” — always have enjoyed a Microsoft OS, ever since I first started using Win 95 — and subsequently with Win 98, (still a favourite OS of mine, though it has been 8 years since I’ve used it).
I have never considered using Linux “full time”, that is, replacing Vista completely — 2 summers ago, I tried dual booting Ubuntu (then 7.10 beta) and Fedora 8, and even openSUSE 10.3. To be honest, I was not impressed by any of them, when compared with XP x64 (and subsequenty Vista).
This has changed, recently, due to the fact that I have found that Vista had begun to become very laggy, and my 92.2GB hard-drive (yes, I’m on a laptop) was reduced to a 5 GB one.
I decided that instead of simply reinstalling Windows, which would requier buying an new edition (or acquiring a new key) — Linux would be my best option. But then a simple question came to mind: which distro?
The Linux distribution choice is probably the most important choice, in front of other choices such as the Desktop Environment, and the Windows Manager. There are so many new, improved options since 2 summers ago, and most of them were released this last summer/spring. Ubuntu/Kubuntu 8.04, Fedora 9, and openSUSE 11.0 have all released, and all of them are strong Linux distros that are easy to use, and generally user friendly (some would argue moreso with Ubuntu/Kubuntu).
I decided to back up all my files, and switch over to Linux completely. Sure, Office 2007 operates quite nice, but I realised that Open Office.org (OOo) version 3.0 will be released this October, and binaries will be available for the major distributions then, in the mean time, I could use OOo 2.4.1, which is a stable, useful relase, and still has many features needed for school work.
I tried Kubuntu 8.04 for a few hours, messing around with it — but in the end, an error with the apt-get function caused me to evaluate my choices, and I decided I’d try Fedora 9, a strong Linux distro. Fedora 9 did not impress me as I thought it would, and I felt that perhaps openSUSE 11.0 would be the diamond, especially after reading positive reveiws from very critical sources for Linux.
I have to say that openSUSE 11.0 (with KDE 4.1) is the most stable OS I’ve used for Linux to date, and I would argue is far more stable than Vista’s OS. This alone makes it imperative for others to hear this — sure, my hardware configuration is going to be different from others, but the staple of my experience remains: flawless. The one-click installation from opensuse.org is a great attribute that has made using this distro absolutely amazing — I will not be switching back to Windows, (at least until Windows 7, if at all) — and I will be seriously considering making openSUSE my distro of choice in the future — especially considering the fact that 11.1 is coming out December 18th, and new features are promised for that release.
I’ll write more about my experiences with openSUSE, for now, I’ll link back to their website, so you can figure out the distro on a very helpful website.
official openSUSE logo
