Over the past few years, Linux on the desktop has been progressing at a rapid pace. Finally, you can start to see the fruits from all the labor and hours put in by tens of thousands of developers across the Internet come together into a coherent desktop. Software that was once prone to weird glitches and crashes, or was just plain hard to install and use, has now become very stable and feature filled. Instead of the developers only trying to push the limits, the software has become mature enough that developers are now starting to worry about "backwards compatibility" and "easy upgrades". This is very promising, distributions are also starting to have longer release schedules, thus allowing for longer testing before release. Applications are also starting to become stable and standard across different distributions.

In the Linux world, there are many popular distributions available, each distribution has its own features and all of them "battle" with each other on the "free enterprise field" trying to become "The" standard Linux Distribution. With all these different distributions available, choosing which distribution to use can be a daunting task. You must investigate the features that sets each different distribution apart, and decide what features you want to have. When investigating, you must remember that if you decide that you do not like a certain distribution because of the way it handles certain things, or because of it's missing features, there will always be an alternative distribution trying to win over customers and/or users with features that are pleasing to you.

This review covers the latest release of Suse's Professional Linux Operating System, version 9.1. This release marks an interesting development in the battle for distribution dominance. This is the first Suse Linux release since Novell completed acquisition of the company in January 2004. So, this distribution offers a "sneak peak" at the direction Novell is taking in regards to the Linux Operating System. The object of this review is to investigate what exactly sets this version of Suse Linux apart from other Linux distributions.

During this review, I tested the software on 2 different computers, a standard desktop computer and a laptop computer. The desktop computer consists of an AMD Athlon 2600+ processor on a Tyan Motherboard with 512MB RAM, a Soundblaster Live sound card and a Nvidia GeforceFX 5600 video card. The laptop, a Dell Inspiron 2650, consists of an Intel Pentium4 processor, 384MB RAM, a Nvidia Geforce2 MX Video card, along with everything else embeded on the main board.

What's Included
As with any modern Linux distribution, Suse Linux 9.1 includes some of the most recent software releases from the Open Source Community, as well as some popular proprietary software packages. Suse Linux 9.1 contains:

Open Source / Free Software Apps including:

* Linux Kernel 2.6.4
* Xfree86 4.4rc2
* KDE 3.2.1
* GNOME 2.4.1
* Samba 3.02a
* OpenOffice.org 1.1.1
* Mozilla 1.6 & FireFox 0.8
* Ximian Evolution 1.4.6
* KDE's new Kontact groupware client

Proprietary software programs and plugins including:

* Sun Microsystem's Java Runtime Environment
* Adobe Acrobat Reader
* Realplayer 8
* Shockwave's Flash player
* A Demo version of MainActor (a Video Editing Suite for Linux)
* Opera web browser
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