SuSE 9.3 Professional

One reason that I love SuSE so much, is their YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) control center. It’s the equivalent to a Control Panel in Windows, and gives you complete control over every technical aspect of the system.

From the software side of things, you can easily update your system via the online update. You can add and remove your installed programs through the Install and Remove Software option. One note about this though, is that unlike Windows, you will only be able to uninstall programs you installed through YaST. Programs you compiled from source, will not be included in the list. This is why you don’t delete the source code directory, so you can uninstall later if you need to. You can also check out your Media, to make sure that it’s in good shape. Other options in here are self explanatory.

As you can easily see, they really give you control over everything. A lot of options related to the Network are here in case you set up a server. Linux is GREAT for servers, and you could easily set up one of your PC’s to act as a web server, e-mail server and even a DNS server. It’s nice to have all this available to you already, rather than having to go download and install them. They even include Apache, which is good in case you want to host your website on your personal server, especially since Apache is relatively easy to set up.

Of course, SuSE comes with a KDE Control Center as well. Here is where you can change the look and style of KDE, change power schemes and configure peripherals. No matter how much of a computer/Linux noobie you are, this is all pretty straight forward and fun to play around with.