Rating: 
Summary: A refreshing change from Red Hat
Review: I've been using Red Hat Linux since 6.1, and I was saddened when they stopped their development of RH9, and shuffled that effort to Fedora.After reading that Novell, a company whose products I've dealt with for a decade, had bought Suse, I went and bought Suse Personal Version 9.0.... What a pleasant surprise! The installation program recognized my nvidia videocard (unlike Redhat), and I was up and running the graphical installation with Suse's installation program. Red Hat (if it cares anymore) should take notes from Suse's great installer. Suse's installation is far superior to Red Hat. All of Suse's installation options are displayed at the beginning of the install, on a bulleted outline screen. It was *simple* to configure the partitions, and arrange the dual-boot (with MS Windows), as well as to specify the location of Linux's GRUB loader. (This last option is unfriendly on Red Hat, unless you happen to know before the RH install starts, that you need to do a custom install). The YaST updater works as smoothly as Red Hat's Up2date, so getting updated over the internet is no problem. YaST even found my scanner, which Red Hat never did, so in hardware probing, Suse is definitely superior. However, there is still no Linux driver for my Visioneer 8100, so I still need MS-Windows to run my scanner.(This leads to another issue: how Linux's incomplete hardware support guarantees that I will --for now -- be stuck with dual-booting to MS-Windows to support all the hardware I have.) In short, after thinking that I would be a Red Hat customer forever, then to be dismayed that Fedora was not where I wanted to be, I have found a new happy home with Suse. Linux still has a little ways to go, before it is a full-featured as MS-Windows is, and can really compete on the desktop against MS-Windows. But this Suse desktop distro is much closer to that point, than Red Hat.
Rating:
Summary: highly recommended
Review: An easy install. Download the evaluation and try, then buy. Downloading evaluation tedious & many drop server connections.
Have dell 8200,philips dvd+ burner,adaptec firewire/usb pci card, dvd-ram&dvd-r external firewire drive, 2 firewire&usb hubs,
usb san disk reader, wacom usb tablet, old panasonic printer,
viewsonic VG171 lcd monitor for hardware. Everything works.
Dual booting with winxp. Partitioned hard drive with Power Quest Partition Magic and then installed SuSe 9.0 Pro.
Moved from Mandrake which will no longer install.
Enjoy & best wishes.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: After 4 days talking to their support group, it is finally known to me that they do NOT support 32-bit Seriel ATA Hard Drives. So I have wasted 4 evenings and countless phone calls with these guys before they figured that they don't support me, which is a fairly common hardware config now days. So beware!!
Rating:
Summary: Nothing but a horror story
Review: Where can I start, this has to be like Windows with NO functionality. Whoever writes the five star reviews must be paid by the company suse. The operating system is a memory and cpu hog, the mulit-media works about as well as a toothache. Plus, my Windows partition, well it is gone now. This costed me a lot of money just to loose all my data, have a non-working pc and best of all it is useless except for sitting with a screen saver. Do yourself a BIG favor and stay away from SUSE!
Rating:
Summary: From bad to worse with linux
Review: For starters trying to configure hardware in linux is like having dental work done without numbing medication. If you like typing then this is for you, command line like went out 10 years ago. What is so great about typing commands to install software? It is a major pain and most of it does not work or you have to be a scientist to make it work. Lastly, I wasted my money on this software, only to spend MORE money purchasing Windows XP Professional what I should have done in the first place. ARRGG one side note, linux wiped out my windows partition....
Rating: 
Summary: I sure hope Novell fixes this mess!
Review: This version of Suse is good, but still falls short in reliability. Like all Linux distributions, this is stable for those applications and harware platforms which are supported and if you get lucky enough and it works right from the start. If not, you are S.O.L. because their "support" that is included from Suse (they call it level 2) does not even include help on setting up your 3D video card (Suse does not support 3D for any video card, so forget about good video performance).
That was no huge problem for me. Instead, something as simple as setting up a printer turned out to be impossible. I only wanted to setup a parallel printer to be shared on my network. I spent days and still couldn't get it working (and as a network admin I have setup hundreds of printers on Windows, Netware, and other *nix servers).
Another big problem is that you install the i686 or i586 versions of programs and then when you do an online update most of these are replaced with i386 versions that run slower (i386 is compatible with i486, i586, i686, but was originally designed for the Intel 386 chip instructions, so it doesn't take advantage of newer chip tecchnology).
Other bad news: many of the applications are outdated or have many glitches (e.g. the game bzflag will not even connect to the servers, they report that your client is too old). The web-based printer config from CUPS/ESP will not allow root to login to configure any printers (even when correct rules are set, they are ignored it seems).
The only good news I have is that USB flash drives seem to actually work (try doing that with RedHat Fedora and it will crash badly or just work once per session). Also, the dual boot with XP seems to work well.
As a former Novell CNE, I really hope to see this product become a good alternative to Windows. As for now, I'm typing this review from a very reliable, functional, insecure, and expensive Microsoft product that is WORKING -- and I hate that fact.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent OS with great features
Review: I recently performed a minor upgrade from SuSE 8.2 Pro to SuSE 9.0 Pro, and despite the seemingly small changes on the surface, underneath, it's obvious that much work has been done for this release. For one thing, the YaST2 setup tool is much more sophisticated in version 9.0, which makes updating packages and changing configuration files very straightforward. Additionally, SuSE 9.0 is the first Linux release I've run that's managed to get all of my devices right on the first try, and I really appreciate that. If you're looking for a reasonably priced, robust, and stable alternative (or replacement!) for Windows, this is it.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Product - But Beware: Used item shipped w/o docs.
Review: SUSE Linux is great. The boxed set should come with 2 manuals. BEWARE of ordering used sets from SarahGifts.com. I ordered a used set from SarahGifts.com and recieved 5 CD's on CD-R's and NO DOCUMENTATION. The whole reason I placed the order was for the documentation. Anyone can download the disks if you have enough bandwidth and don't care about support.
Rating:
Summary: Warnings to Windows XP Users
Review: I just got a brand new computer, with Windows XP preinstalled. Since I've grown used to using both Windows and Linux programs, I bought Suse Linux 9.0 to install alongside XP. And that turned out a bit more harder than expected, since Windows XP (like Windows NT) comes with the NTFS file system that Linux doesn't fully understand yet. As a result, Linux can't defragment the Windows hard disk. Meaning that unless you are lucky enough that Windows XP hasn't spread its files over the whole hard disk yet (which had already happened on my new system which I had turned on only 3 times or so before), Linux can't create enough space for its own installation on the same disk. The Linux handbook suggests that you should run the defragmenter in Windows - but unfortunately the Windows defragmenter may leave system or hidden files at the end of the disk since they are unmovable while Windows is running, and you still can't create enough space for Linux! So you either have to delete Windows XP completely and reinstall, buy a commercial partition manager (about $60/$80), buy a second hard drive, or spend hours or days on the internet looking for other solutions, like a better defragmenter or tips which system files to disable etc... If you are hoping for any help from Suse, better don't. ***WARNING***: Since Suse seems very aware of that problem, their 30 day free installation support very clearly excludes resizing Windows XP partitions!!! Ones you manage to get around that problem (it took a while, but I eventually managed decrease the size of the Windows partition without having to delete anything), Suse installed fine, is running much faster that XP, it had almost no problems finding all the new hardware. The only exception was the (internal) modem, which turned out to be a Winmodem, i.e., one of those that are taylored to only work with Windows since they come with reduced hardware. They are cheaper, and I'd guess it's very likely that if you buy a new computer with Windows and a modem preinstalled, it's going to be one of these Winmodems. By now, many of them can be made to work in Linnux, too, but depending on how lucky you are, it may take even longer to find the solution that's right for you than the defragmenting problem. Ah right, the Suse installation support? - Hehe, another ***WARNING***: They specifially exclude internal modems as well! I don't want to blame Suse too much for excluding these two problems, since it's beyond their control if Windows software and hardware makes it difficult to install other operating systems. They got everything else to work fine, and are making progress on the Winmodems and even reading the NTFS file systems. So I still give it 4 stars, but want to warn that if you want to install it alongside Windows XP, it could become a bit messy...
Rating:
Summary: WinXP vs Linux 9.0
Review: First, I have to agree with the other reviewers who gave this product a 4 or 5. Microsoft can only wish (or steal)to have an operating system this goooood. Installation is a breeze. The OS detected every piece of hardware on my system and everthing worked once the setup was complete. For those of you who had a negative experience with LNX 9 it's because you did not read, or you missed a step in the (almost 400 pg) user manual, which by the way is very thorough. In addition, the OS comes with top shelf programs, that you have to buy seperately when using MS Windows ie..photo editing, office suite, desktop publishing, cd burning, e-mail programs, web browsers and to many others to name. The program equivilants to what comes with LNX would be Photoshop, MS Office, Adobe Illustrator... Last, but not the least...when you work in LNX 9 for the first time you know that it's special...once other people/ businesses catch on ... we'll u know the rest....
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