Dear Suse,

A week ago, I went to ConneXions, Annanagar to buy some interesting book and other miscellany (including a cool mouse pad, whose review will follow). I noticed that Suse 10.0 OSS version dvd was bundled along with the November issue of Linux For You magazine. Since this was during my XP formatathon, I purchased it to try it out.
I installed it in some 8GB of unpartitioned space I had. I don't think there's any point in talking about the installation part, as linux installation, for the past couple years, had been simple enough to go through (except for some wierdo distros aimed at sooper-nerds). Maybe it could've been worse if I had tried to install linux on my raid-0 array. Infact, suse told me that I have a software raid contrary to what my BIOS informs her! Whatever. Since I didn't want to install in the raid partition, the install went uneventfully (if u don't count successfully installing linux as an event, that is). For those who want to have a look at the install though, here's a flash movie :)
One thing I noticed at boot up was that now there's a splash screen with progress indicator. Newbees rejoiced, as they would've found a bunch of growing dots less intimidating than the pages of scrolling dos text à la hollywood style or a progress barless screen that I was used to. Of course, this feature might've been introduced in earlier versions and I only noticed now. But I was annoyed that some things stayed the same. I mean, even after so many years since I last checked out linux, why should I still manually enter the monitor frequencies when I don't have to do so in any of the windows OS?

Yast2
Imagine having to know how to extract vcd frames from a vcd just to watch a movie. Many geeks reading this may be able to do so. But you are not the main market for the vcd industry. The average joe who just want things to work, are the ones, fortunately or unfortunately.
Following this analogy, I would say that linux is a right pain when you want to install anything in it. With utilities like Yast, this has almost been eradicated. Yast2 was good. The apropos style searching for programs and drivers is appreciable. Only thing that you have to do manually is to seek out installation sources: the path to software packages on the Internet or local disks. This step too could've been automated with something similar to GWebCache in gnutella so that we get only the recent list of servers hosting some essential packages, or atleast the packages that come with the DVD.
Another thing with Yast was that, by default the installation source had one entry named 'cdrom' something. But it didn't search my DVD drive at all, even though that's where I installed it from. Later, when I added "dvd:\" or something like that (after googling), I was able to search for some dependencies in the DVD drive. Also, it took minutes to refresh from all the Installation sources (3 sites and dvd). Maybe because of slow sites.
The first thing I did with yast was to download Nvidia driver for suse. I would've had a tad trouble finding drivers for my old ATi card (9700pro), but, thankfully, NVidia pays equal importance to linux version of its drivers. With or without the drivers, the way linux renders everything onscreen has been, somehow, delightfully different. I tell you what, you take the same webpage and view it in linux and in windows and compare the quality for yourself. My friend Balakrishnan used to say the same thing of linux when he tried to make me abandon windows forever. Not just the visuals, the sound is different too. And again, it's delightfully so, as the volume goes higher and sounds more amplified without any jarring artifacts. I couldn't believe it was the same computer that ran under windows the first time I ran linux and I've just rediscovered that feeling.

Multimedia keys and Mouse buttons
Other things that I've gotten quite used to in the windows world, but couldn't figure out in the linux "woerld" were my keyboard's multimedia keys and my mouse's forward & backward buttons [link]. There were tutorials to make the mouse buttons work by changing the mappings in Xwindow. I followed the example for a 6 button mouse, but it turned out that my mouse was 7 button. I haven't gotten round to try the new mapping yet.

The same's the story with my keyboard special keys too. Tried quite a few advises from various forums, but all of them had wireless multimedia keyboard and none of their advice worked on my wired one.

AmaroK
I love iTunes (you won't like it only if u haven't tried it). There's, of course, a Mac version too. But sadly, there's no iTunes for linux, yet. Just what Apple means by it, I don't know. I searched around and found that crossover office users can now enjoy itunes on linux. But I found a worthy temporary place-holder for iTunes, called Amarok. I could connect to my last.fm account using its intrinsic plugin. It uses recommended music based on my history of songs in the 'dynamic mode'. Kinda Ok feature, but tends to annoy you by repeating songs over and over. It's got an OK interface. With so many features spread over horizontal and vertical tabs, it could tend to be complex and non-intuitive. For example, I can't figure out how to “uncheck” a song to keep it from playing. And it's context menu could do with some more entries, like what iTunes has. But I loved the automatic lyric display (based on some OSS plugin which lets you submit lyrics), artist/album/title search (using some interface to wikipedia) and context functionality that displays the various context in which the current song appears. I would love to have some of these features in iTunes.
I couldn't find any codec installed by default that would play my mp3 or mov (quicktime) collection. So I had to install a windows codec collection called w32codec-all that really did contain almost all of the plugins necessary. My media collection is in a space-sparse 80GB harddrive in NTFS format. Amarok had a very good album art manager which, unfortunately, couldn't write to the NTFS media drive. The last time I checked, there was only support for over-writing files in NTFS. But maybe I would've found a fully supported ntfs write driver if I had searched for it in Yast.

FireFox
The onboard nvidia ethernet card was detected correctly. But I was looking all over to setup a ppoe conection. Finally found it under the ATM devices setup. A minor observation, and nothing more, in firefox is that, double-clicking the address bar in the Windows version selects the text till a delimiter. But in linux it selects the entire text. It was a bit annoying as I was used to do this to quicky select and change the last value in the url (like, http://forum.com/?forum=32) to quicly move among sub forums.

At the end of the day, Suse's Yast rules and the new versions of Gnome and KDE look promising. Though I am sure I haven't enjoyed anything that is exclusive to Suse 10 version, it will be the future patches, apps and derivative distros released by the OSS community that will make the impact of the OSS decision felt better. Already there is an OS effort called SUPER (Suse Performance Enhanced Release) to release a slimmer and nimbler Suse. I only checked out the gnome desktop. Many seem to favour the KDE environment, but I find gnome to be less cluttered and simple.
But I am still not using linux as main OS because I don't want to hassle with making visual studio, my games and other apps that I use to work in linux. It's the general laziness prevalent among windows users.