* Sjoerd Hiemstra (shiems.suselist@freeler.nl) [030331 09:38]: ->As far as I understand, Apple has its own flavor of Linux, named ->Darwin, on top of which OSX runs. Yes I recall their infamous ad 'Send ->other Unices to /dev/null', once mentioned in this list - I also saw it ->in the British Linux Magazine lately - thrashing their roots, not being ->very grateful to the ones they took it from, it seems. AFAICT, Apple was ->never very good at marketing, and this was another bad move. Well, OSX isn't based on Linux. It's in fact based on FreeBSD and uses a Mach kernel..both of these parts are Open Source but the GUI (Aqua) is not. It's a proprietary Apple product. As far as running SuSE on it. They seem to be REALLY far behind on their PPC version which is most likely because it's not really their cash cow like X86 is. My opinion..which may sound strange to some because I'm such a staunch SuSE support is that if you are going to buy a Mac then you should most likely either run OSX (my preference) or checkout Yellow Dog Linux which is much, much more up to date. In fact YD 3.0 comes with KDE 3.1.1, XFree 4.3..etc..etc. So your newer hardware such as the Radeon 9000 which a lot of Macs are shipping with these days would be supported. If SuSE decided to put out a PPC 8.2 with all the current bells, whistles and updates then I could see using it. But the fact is SuSE PPC 7.3 is just to damn old and will most likely give you fits of rage trying to get things to work..such as video, sound and maybe even installation. ->A number of big applications, such as Star Office or Word Perfect, seem to ->require the i386 architecture. Does this mean that they could not be run ->on Linux for PPC? You seem to kind of hit the nail on the head. If you want to be able to run OSX then I would suggest a Mac because you can also do YD 3.0 on it. But if your looking for applications that work as advertised and for the most bang for your buck then I would go with an X86 box. You can get 3x the speed and other such things with X86 for about 40% of the price of a comparable Mac. ->I heard rumors that the only available office application for the Mac ->is MS Office??? And Internet Exploder is their default browser??? -> Actually, Yes..Internet Exploder is the default. But you can change that easy enough and get rid of it. My wife has always been a Mac user but she flat out refuses to use Microsoft products on her Mac. She uses Mozilla 1.3 for browsing and email (imap) and she's quite happy with it. She liked Apples mail client until it refused to read the mailboxes it created after she upgraded from 10 to 10.1. I've seen OSX's version of MS Office and it's pretty good but it doesn't import and export .doc, .xls and other MS formats as good as Open Office does which seems weird since Microsoft are the bozo's who made the software. All in all I'd do X86 and SuSE 8.2 when it's released...unless you really want to use OSX. latah, -- Ben Rosenberg ---===---===---===--- mailto:ben@whack.org Tell me what you believe.. I'll tell you what you should see.