Spending a weekend doing a lot of things but not accomplishing anything is a waste. Having said that, I spent the weekend reading up on Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop, SLED for short and I think I'm willing to spend another weekend buying a 160GB PATA HDD to house XP (sic), SLED and Ubuntu (another popular Linux distro).

I've tried installing Suse 9 and in terms of installation, it was a success. The machine was dual-booting Suse 9/XP (sic) and for a couple of minutes I was jumping around shouting "Woohoo! Punk rock!" around the house.

That was about a year ago. After a few days of tinkering, I decided to stay away and delete the Linux partition because it wasn't yet as easy as it should be.

Software installations should be seamless. The simplest I've seen is by dragging needed software inside the Application folder and you're done. It should be that way. I'm not sure if that's a piece of propietary technology but if it is, then such technology shouldn't be patented in my humble opinion. I digress.

So, what's the perfect desktop or notebook then, you ask. The correct answer is there aren't any.

Unfriendliness towards the end users is causing Linux to fight an ever uphill climb to be on top of users' desktops everywhere despite the fact that it's open source or command lines to install a package (data cabinets for Microsoft customers) of a software or mounting HDD or folders around. in existence. No matter how you look at it, Windows is riddled with security issues and Macs are generally perceived as expensive. And on top of that, you still have to buy software.

With all the negativity, why am I writing this then? The answer is because Novell has released SLED 10. From the looks of it, I'm giving Linux a few more tries. And I've ordered 10 CDs from Ubuntu last week to spread the joy around again.

Check out these SLED 10 screen shots and geek out.

If by any chance you don't know what Linux is, wiki it.