YMMV, but MY Linux desktop stinks

> Your suggestion to Victor to switch to SuSE 9.0 helps him how?

I think that choosing the right distro is a very important and often
overlooked part of learning Linux. My first experience with Linux was
with Redhat and it was terrible. Then a year and a half later or so a
friend (MCSE no less) gave me the CDs to a few other distributions and I
ended up trying Mandrake and loved it because everything worked
perfectly on the first try. I thought that maybe the Redhat experience
had improved as well so I gave it another shot, still no go. Years
later after happily running Mandrake, then linuxfromscratch, then gentoo
I gave Redhat another shot for use on my laptop, and it was still not
the distro for me.

Now, I'm not trying to knock Redhat here. To each his own. But I know
I personally wouldn't be using and loving Linux if Redhat was the only
thing out there. I also know I'm not alone in that sentiment.

It's like someone shopping for a family vehicle, getting a motorcycle
because that's the only brand he has heard of, and then finding that it
doesn't meet his needs when he tries to take the family out for a spin.
He really needs a minivan, but a motorcycle is well suited for his
mechanic, who makes all sorts of modifications so the whole family can
fit on the bike. Pretty soon he goes back to the Microsoft public
transportation system.

Once someone has settled on a distribution, I'm all for supporting them
with whatever issues they have, but encouraging them to "shop around"
may end up being the best advice we can give someone starting out.

-- Karl