Frustrated with Windows and want to switch? Lately I’ve been curious with the consumer experience for Linux. That is, the folks who don’t want to go download the software from linux directly (for free, yes I know it can be done for free), and instead will buy the commercial distributions and support offering.

I tried out both commercial releases of Red Hat (version 9) and SuSE (version 9.0) and tried them both out on a production machine which was running Windows XP Professional and contained the nVidia Geforce FX graphics card.



Redhat would not play nicely at all with nVidia graphics card. In fact, in order to get Redhat to boot at all I had to boot from floppy and change the BIOS not to acknowledge the graphics card. Needless to say, that wasn’t going to make for a very friendly dual-boot environment. I spent two separate days trying deal with and resolve this situation. I never was able to get the free technical support through the Red Hat site. I had trouble connecting to the online updates from them. Windows wasn’t nearly this frustrating. I gave up. I’m sure if I had ripped out the graphics card things would have gone more smoothly, but I imagine the average consumer would have run back to Windows after a few hours and been glad to put up with their previous frustrations.

Enter SuSE Linux 9.0. I was able to get everything loading and running with the dual boot option successfully on the first install, although I did have a couple minor issues:

1) XWindows wouldn’t install properly (read errors) from the CD-ROM. Probably just a bum spot on the disc. This was resolved by the handy online update interface (which wouldn’t sync up with USA sourceforge, but the Germany [default] setting worked great in repairing.
2) the KDE kept defaulting to the wrong keyboard type (104 key instead of 101 standard)
3) the monitor resolution wouldn’t change from inside KDE. I had to go into failsafe mode and edit the X86config file to fix both #2 and #3.
4) unable to modify the nVidia Graphics card settings within the YaST interface. This issue hasn’t been resolved as of this writing, but I haven’t needed to use 3D mode. I did update the nVidia driver through the YaST interface, but that didn’t change anything.

So for those looking for a commercial linux solution, I’d recommend SuSE Linux. It was far easier to setup than Red Hat with this particular dual-boot environment where I tested.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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