The subtitle of this review could so easily be 'a tale of two operating systems.' That one of them is good and the other bad should not be surprising; that they are both the same operating system might raise more of an eyebrow.

The operating system in question is SuSe Linux 9.0, specifically the Personal edition. This is one of the most modern and popular Linux distributions, and one poised to grow in popularity and support now that the company has been bought by Novell.

While it is available as a downloadable CD image, there are also a number of boxed editions available for purchase. The personal edition is one of these and comprises three CDs, a user manual and free telephone support for installation problems. The latter should be enough to justify the cost of purchase against the cost of downloading the CD image.

In addition to the basic operating system, the personal edition uses the KDE desktop and includes a full range of applications and utilities for the home user. This includes the marvellous OpenOffice.org office suite, plus a variety of graphics and sound applications, including CD and DVD burner software, MP3 players, Web browsers and so on. In short it provides the full range of kit required to replace both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.

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However, we had two very different experiences when it came to installation and setup. In the first instance we suffered the pain and frustration of an installation that went badly wrong and could not be recovered. This was on a no-brand PC running Windows 2000, with the first IDE disk formatted as a single NTFS partition and the second disk formatted as a single FAT32 partition.

The YaST2 installer successfully reported on the Windows partitions and suggested resizing and repartitioning so that the machine could be used to dual-boot Windows and Linux. As suggested by the manual the NTFS partition had been defragged prior to the installation.

The entire installation process was followed through, from repartitioning and reformatting the Linux partitions to choosing the packages to be installed. It was at the final hurdle, after the software had been copied to the new Linux partitions, that things went badly wrong. Rather than launching into SuSe the machine rebooted to a command-line prompt for the Grub boot manager. No amount of hunting through help files, manuals and books helped move things further. Nor could the machine be booted back into Windows.

After several attempts at restarting the installation process from the CD, all of which ended up at the same Grub prompt, an elderly DOS boot disk was deployed to restore the master boot record of the disk which was enough to get Windows back. In the end Partition Magic had to be used to get things back where they started.

This frustrating experience contrasts badly with the installation on a different machine. Here there was no Windows partition to deal with. Installation proceeded smoothly and quickly. All devices were recognised and configured correctly, selection of software packages was straightforward, though be aware that games and development tools are not installed as standard. Even if you are not a developer you are likely to need the development tools in order to compile updates, device drivers and other software that you download at some point.

The KDE desktop is clean, uncluttered and attractive. The Konqueror Web browser is fast and easy to use and preferable to Netscape Navigator which some Linux distributions install as standard. And of course OpenOffice.org is a truly impressive piece of software. In fact once installed there was little to find fault with. It simply worked and worked well.

These contrasting experiences make it hard to unequivocally recommend SuSe. In the past it has had a reputation of being a less 'friendly' distribution compared to Red Hat or Mandrake, especially Mandrake. When it works it seems to work extremely well, however when it fails it may need a fair amount of work to figure out why and to correct it. That said, it needs to be emphasised that dual-booting with NTFS partitions is notoriously difficult and that we did not take the opportunity to phone the installation support line.