My experience with SUSE 9.3 -- its still not ready (Score 1)

and 8.2. I installed 8.2 a couple years back. At that time, the first problem I encountered was that it did not correctly support my USB keyboard. Then the printer (a common HP one) was not configured correctly. There was no 3-D support built in for my NVIDIA graphics card. Well, you all know the drill -- research each issue on the internet, find a solution -- all time consuming and irritating.

Well, I just upgraded to SUSE 9.3. And what do I see? My NVIDIA driver is uninstalled and replaced with one without 3-D support again. The provided YAST install of the 3-D driver fails, so I have to download the driver and do it all myself from the command line. The sound card is configured as "muted" by default.

Now, the errors with the keyboard and with the NVIDIA drivers were bugs in SUSE. Other issues included poor choices of default behavior. I am happy to put up with it all in order to have a LAMP platform to work with, how on earth is your average computer user going to deal with these issues? Every issue I had to fix involved using unix commands from the command line. 95% of your potential users would have know clue what to do. It is these minor technical barriers that infest most (all?) Linux distributions and kill Linux on the desktop. Microsoft used to use dirty tricks to trip up competitors with technical barriers that would frustrate users and destroy their competitors business. Fortunately for Microsoft, Linux vendors destroy their own business by creating their own unnecessary technical barriers.