On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 14:32 +0100, Simon Royal wrote:
Hi
I am looking at different distros. I need high hardware compatibility, ease of use for newbies plus reasonable speed out of dated hardware.
It is my experience that the heavyweight distro's are generally better suited to newbies...With the caveat that they won't learn as much using them.
Suse in particular is very very newbie friendly..it is possible to administer a Suse machine without ever having to drop to a shell prompt...However learning how to administer Linux via YaST will do nothing to prepare you for administering any other Linux machine.
Both Gnome and KDE (default for Ubuntu and Suse respectively) are quite resource heavy...you will find the going quite slow on anything less than 500 Mhz and 256MB Ram. Nothing is stopping you from running a more lightweight window manager on either Ubuntu or Suse..but in doing so you lose some of the "niceness" of either of those distro's.
On a level playing field I would say that ubuntu is perhaps very slightly less resource hungry than Suse...but if there is a difference there then it is very small.
Lightweight distros such as Vector or DSL will give you far better performance on limited hardware..but you may find the learning curve slightly steeper