SuSE Linux Office Desktop Review

By Jim on September 8th, 2003

Well it had to happen – yet another Linux distro is now making a concerted effort to go after the mainstream desktop. This time it’s SuSE, one of the largest and most popular distros around. One of the biggest complaints people have with Linux is that they can’t run a lot of their old Windows applications – especially Microsoft Office.

In this release SuSE has worked hard to create a version of their Linux distro that runs MS Office applications, and that is also generally more geared toward ordinary desktop users. This release is based on SuSE 8.1, but contains key additional desktop applications including StarOffice 6.0, and Xandros has already released a similar product. So we suspect that this version is going to make a big splash with users and companies looking for an alternative to Windows on their desktops.

Installation in this version of SuSE is pretty much a no-brainer. If you’ve installed Windows then a SuSE install won’t faze you a bit. SuSE’s installer just keeps getting better and better over time. It took about 20 minutes for us to get everything installed. We did a clean install on one of our Dell test boxes and had no burps or other problems with the installer. Everything went exceptionally smoothly.

We opted to do a customized install rather than the default install so we could include some multimedia stuff and games. We also chose to have all of KDE installed (including KOffice). Since this version of SuSE is geared toward the desktop, there’s a lot less applications included than in the Pro version. That’s as it should be; most non-techies would be overwhelmed by the number of apps included with the Pro version of SuSE.

SuSE 8.1 comes with Star Office 6.0 and, if you opt to install it during installation, KOffice as well. The usual array of desktop Linux apps is also present including Evolution, Kmail, Knode, Gimp, Ksnapshot and others. For those who are interested in multimedia, there are also the usual things like CD burning software, Realplayer, etc. SuSE also bundled some desktop games but, frankly, we’d rather just play the ones on Yahoo if we were interested in cards, etc.