-------------- Original message ---------------------- From: "Witold Wolski" <wewolski@gmail.com>

Hi,

I spend the last 2 weeks installing various linux distros on a new latitude X1. And I think I will go with the Suse 10.1 for a while. It is is a good distro for someone how does not wants to be bothered with linux administration interna. And I do not want to. It recognises most of the hardware. Yast is a user friendly tool (although surprisingly still buggy tool). At least you have all the tools for configuring and installing in one place. I am also quite happy with the support for the KDE desktop given by suse.

The only thing that really s... is that the support for multimedia is poor. Non of the installed multimedia players is playing avi files for examples. I can not find an officially supported mPlayer rpm etc...

You do understand the reason for this? It is all about software patents. This is the reason you see the arguments for odf, and against odf (by Microsoft). If you control the format that things get saved in, once you control it, you can charge pretty much whatever you want, as you hold THEIR data hostage.

Of course there are plenty of other things that should be improved and are buggy. The bottom line is, I am very surprised how easy it is to set up linux on you laptop, how cool it runs without much effort and how fast you can get help on this mailing list.

Thanks to suse and this mailing list.

For getting things working, check out http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/254/42/ . Software patents and Linux, started being an issue several years ago, as they dropped MP3 support, when Franhoffer (spelling?) started enforcing his patents.