Helmholtz Coil's Journal: Suse 9.1-Returning

Well, as I posted a day or two ago, I pre-ordered a copy of SuSE 9.1 Personal beginning of April and it shipped out to me last Friday.

Yes, I know. The Personal version isn't really designed for people with experience in Linux, and I should have gone for the Professional version. But in my own defence, the Pro version is what, $60 more than the Personal? I don't know about the rest of you but $60 is still a fair chunk of change to me. Besides, I figured I could always upgrade later on if I needed. Turns out that that's easier said than done, so much so that it really didn't seem worthwhile.

Anyway, long story short, I was sort of underwhelmed by the whole experience. I was able to install 9.1 (eventually-required a fair bit of Windows swap file kanoodling) and uninstall it, and it did recognize most of my R3000Z hardware. It did see the integrated winmodem, and although it didn't work I didn't really expect it to; I wasn't able to get my tried-and-true known-to-work -in-Linux 56K modem to work either. And I did think it was semi-cheesy to not have a AMD64 kernel ready to go on the Personal version as an option.

Originally my plan was to keep 9.1 even if it didn't work or didn't work for me, to help promote a Linux company (and indirectly Linux development) I suppose. I made the mistake of saying as much on /. and the usual suspects took me to task for it-something along the lines of it isn't charity if you get something for it. And I decided that I agree. I paid money for it and I should treat them like any other company when I have a problem with their product and return it. It's a harsh reality in some ways, but I think that in the long run it will help Linux by not "settling" for things the way they are. It might not help SuSE in the short run, though, which does bother me a bit.

Don't get me wrong-I was fairly impressed with SuSE Personal 9.1. All in all I think it's a solid choice; in fact I would recommend it to anyone who bought a computer and wanted to either try Linux or didn't want to pay as much for Windows and didn't need a full-fledged Linux install. If I had more money, I'd probably cheerfully buy the Pro version. And I'm not trying to come down on Linux or SuSE or anyone else that might take offense.

So a question for all the readers out there-can anyone suggest a Linux distro that supports AMD64 (2.6 kernel I guess), that has all the regular development tools, and that supports nondestructive repartitioning of an NTFS drive?