Almost there: Linux on the desktop

[Bob George]

I've written over the years that I've been using Linux on my servers for some 
time, but wasn't quite ready to make the jump to the desktop. I'm now making 
a concerted effort to migrate to a Windows-free environment at home, with the 
exception of those games the kids can't live without. Unfortunately, I'm 
hitting a wall. I've got two distributions going on my current machine (Dual 
Celeron 500, 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon video SB Live! 5.1 audio). Everything 
works pretty well, except:

Under SuSE 8.0, I can't seem to get 3D video working with the video card. 
Apparently, this is a widespread problem with SuSE 8.0 but I'm wondering if 
anyone on this list has had more luck.

Under Debian 2.2 updated to "unstable" (Sid) -- my preferred distribution -- I 
can not get the ALSA audio drivers working. I'm suspecting I'm just missing a 
.deb or two, as I get the same results with two other audio cards as well 
(Turtle Beach and SB16), althouth sndconfig will see the SB16. I've installed 
anything showing in "apt-cache search alsa", and I've verified that the 
default 2.4.18-686 kernel I'm using has full sound support. I've even 
successfully copied the kernel and modules from the SuSE install (where it 
works) with no luck. alsaconf doesn't see the card at startup, and fails at 
the end. I've tried doing an lsmod under SuSE, then insmod'ing those same 
under Debian, but a few won't work ... though I'm puzzled why.

So, any Debian studlys having good luck with ALSA under 2.4? Any SuSE fanatics 
willing to sway a longtime Debian user by sharing the secrets of enabling 3D 
on a Radeon board?

Other than these two annoying problems, I'm pretty pleased. I've mostly been 
using SuSE due to the audio issue, and I do find their menu configuration 
tools for KDE cumbersome. I haven't tried KDE on Debian enough to say if it's 
as "odd". There are little things an advanced Windows user might miss, but 
for the typical user who never changes anything, it seems to work pretty 
well.

My take on it is that Linux (or rather X/KDE) is still a tad awkward, but that 
the apps seem to getting things together pretty well. KMail hits my primary 
requirements (multiple IMAP accounts), and I've only started futzing with the 
latest incarnations of other mail clients. For basic day-to-day 
wordprocessing and web browsing, the tools seem to have come a long way in 
the last year.

Cool things I like about Linux on the desktop:
1. Multiple desktops!
2. Ability to install two distributions into separate partitions, copy configs 
freely between them and NOT worry about everything suddently not working.

The reason I finally made this jump was I tried using DriveCopy to dupe my 
Win2K config to a new drive, and Windows refused to let me log in after that. 
So screw it, time to dump Windows.

Any help appreciated. Thanks all!

- Bob