I am deciding what I should get Mandrake 9.0 or Suse 8.1. I am a newbie at this linux stuff. What would you suggest. Thanks

As far as I know (and I could be wrong), Mandrake final has not been released yet. I have Suse 8.0, and it seems to be OK. Though I wish it wasn't so dummy proof. I like to have a little more control over the install like I have with Red Hat or Mandrake. So if you can't wait for the Mandrake final, Suse is not bad.

Taylor, I have Mandrake 9.0 on a desktop dual boot Win98SE and a laptop dual boot WinXPpro and I am extremely happy with it for both platforms. I have used Redhat 6.2 and 7.0 also Mandrake 8.1 and the new Mandrake has come along way . For a beginner I would say this is the easiest version of linux to setup and use and it comes with so much software it will keep you busy just browsing and checking out all the cool stuff. Install is great and it recognized all of my hardware right away. It can be purchased from many suppliers or downloaded for nothing . I got mine from http://www.spidertools.com/ for only $5.49 US . I ordered on Friday and had the discs in hand on the following Tuesday ( now that’s what I call service). I have not used any of the Suse distros but I hear they are very good also. One of my favorite features with the new Mandrake is it can mount my Windows XP NTFS partion without any additional tweaking and it also comes bundled with Open Office 1.0 so that you can read ,write and edit MS word and excel files . Check out the following site for comparisons of all the Linux Distributions. http://www.distrowatch.com/ Good luck and God Bless Matt_h