was proprietory and anything not Gateway was not compatable. If you
were more experienced, I'd say Linux is a possibility, but really,


Hi Corday,

Originally I was going to say what Mike said, but also that there will
inevitably be suggestions to use Linux - though I anticipated from the
fanboy; whereas yours seems neutral (if like most, short on first hand
knowledge but doing certain others the honour of assuming them to be capable
of objectivity. Which some could say I'm not - I was going to liken the
claims for Ubuntu to the claims that "there's nothing wrong with smoking -
my grandad smoked 60 a day and lived to be 90, when he was hit by a bus!"
Substitute this for "My mum uses Ubuntu and thinks it's the greatest thing
since sliced bread!").

But Mike posted before me, so I didn't bother. But I just submitted the
following e-mail to opensuse.org and figured I might as well post it he

snip

I like openSUSE. It is about the only Linux distro I do like. But they all -
or at least the main ones - share the same fundamental problem: the
boot/partition management. Oh, it might be fine if all you are running is
Linux. But if multibooting with one or more Windows versions there are far
too many significant problems from the Linux end - which rather answers the
question "which to keep?"

openSUSE is better than - for instance - Debian-based distros, as far as
booting is concerned. In my experience all Debian-based distros are really
bad at finding the partition they just a moment ago installed to - whereas
Windows is comparatively excellent at this.

Windows NT6 - becoming more and more like Linux - is becoming less adaptable
such as when one reorders disk priority. 9x continues to boot no problem.
NT4/5 only requires changing a single number in boot.ini. Vista, Server 2008
and Windows 7 are quite easily redirected to the correct disk using BootItNG
(to get to BCDEdit) - no typing required! Even openSUSE, however, can fail
to boot when the disk order is changed in the bios and the (automated)
Repair Tool screw the installation up (not every time but the point is it is
not reliable!). I mean, most of the time one can change e.g. hd(0,1) to
hd(1,1) and boot to the desktop, then edit menu.lst (IIRC) - but not every
time!

But the biggest problem is that the partitioner even when one selects to do
it manually, often chooses to rearrange some of one's other partitions -
typically shared data partitions - and frequently changes a Primary
partition to an Extended, when it absolutely is not an Extended, absolutely
should not become an Extended, and I have verified really does it if you
allow the installation to proceed!

Only an idiot would consider that data is not at serious risk installing
openSUSE other than when none is present.

There are no such problems using PowerQuest Partition Magic 8. Why could
PowerQuest write a perfectly stable partition manager more than 6 years ago,
yet openSUSE still rely on a POS?

I have been trialling openSUSE for a few years now. Initially I was also
trialling Mandrake (then Mandriva), Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and Kubuntu, but
I settled on openSUSE as the best by a long chalk. Now I won't waste any
more time trialling distros with the same highly suspect partition
management - it never gets fixed, there is so much complacency in the
community - and since I loathe KDE4, if the only way I can get openSUSE with
KDE3 is by installing an old version (with said partition management
issues), I'll be giving up on ever being able to ditch Microsoft.

desnip

No offence.

Shane