All that changed in Sept 2004, when a friend gave me SUSE Linux 9.2 – his words were – “SUSE is also called the Mercedes of the Linux world”. SUSE Linux Version 9.2 got me hooked to a point where I was willing to try it out for some time albeit with my XP on a different partition as a standby - 'in case, there was some problem'.

The first week was quite painful – moving over 200 MB of emails across OS's is not a job for the faint hearted. I tried various cross platform programs like Thunderbird and finally managed to get the job done. The effort was worth it. SUSE 9.2 was easy to install, recognized all my hardware easily, did all the partitioning on its own. In fact it pretty much installed itself on its own. SUSE 9.2 was by far the best Linux distro I had seen for common business user. I refer to the type who at any given time has the following open - a browser, an email client, a file manager, a word processor and a spreadsheet program. Life consists of surfing some sites, POPing mail from any account, working on and exchanging Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

All that was very well covered by Konqueror (browser, file manager), OpenOffice (word processor, spreadsheet) and Evolution (email client). The GUI and the overall experience was exquisite, the only glitch was that it seemed a bit heavy on the system. Still, I wasn't complaining too much considering all those years of Virus attacks and buggy software from the world of Windows.

Then came SUSE Linux 9.3 by which time I was hooked enough to get rid of the Windows partition itself and go the whole hog with SUSE. However the gripes just increased – OpenOffice was a major drain on the system. The solution was to upgrade to more computing power and RAM. Expensive, but well....NO way, I am going back to XP!

So when the same friend, gave me a DVD of the “latest, latest” SUSE 10, I was a bit wary? More hardware upgrades? Was the WINTEL -Windows- Intel syndrome being repeated all over again? Fortunately with SUSE 10, Novell as well as the other biggies like OpenOffice seem to have got everything right for a change. The OS is a shade faster than version 9.3. OpenOffice was certainly twice as faster in opening files.

Apart from the welcome improvement in speed, I really could not find anything else new. All the regulars programs seem to have upgraded their versions, but the version number seems to be the only thing new!

The OS itself does have some new stuff which I have listed below