SuSE has a reputation for providing a wide range of software. The company has reached the stage where it now provides everything on one DVD to save customers from constant swapping of CDs during installation (as an aside, RedHat would have benefited from this). It doesn't seem so long ago that software vendors turned to the CD to prevent constant swapping of floppy disks!

SuSE has quite a good graphical installer, called Yast 2, which provides a decent level of control over installation. To us, a measure of a good installer is how it deals with partitioning of the hard disk, since this is where issues with dual boot of Windows and Linux and other boot problems occur. Yast 2 has an intuitive approach to this minefield in the install process.

In use, SuSE encourages good practice by altering the background to a red and black bomb design when users are logged in as the 'root' user (Admin), to highlight the fact that it's generally not a very good idea to log in as root for the sake of it. For this reason, most Linux packages actually take you through the process of creating an ordinary user account during installation. Correct practice is to use the 'su' command to temporarily gain root privileges from a terminal window. This avoids any unintentional deletion of important files.

Our one caveat when installing SuSE is to think about what software you need. We foolishly installed everything to see how much of our massive test hard disk we could fill, and were then faced with the install process taking the best part of a day! Realistically, you won't use anywhere near the 1,800 packages included. Still, if you want to play around with Linux, SuSE will keep you occupied for years if you let it.