>>I paid a total of about $90 for SuSE 7.3 Pro, a Codeweaver QuickTime Plugin, and a money management program called MoneyDance 2.0.
>
>Jerry,
>
What's your take on the Lycoris distribution? (http://msnbc.com/news/737744.asp?0dm=C11IT)

It has an excellent PR machine going for it, and it is trying hard to link itself to the old Corel Linux. But, it is NOT up to SuSE 7.3 or Mandrake 8.0.

When installing SuSE or Mandrake you don't have to write down all your card types for later installation. S & M detects your equipment and presents its selection to you for automatic installation or customization, depending on what you want to do. S & M are able to do this because they take advantage of the Linux 2.4 kernel's highly modular design. SuSE, for example, has 10 different kernels pre-configured for various usages (server, workstation, firewall, etc..), but the most common one is a standalone workstation that has about all the peripheral cards, monitors, printers, etc... as modules which can be loaded or unloaded on the fly. Installation is even easier than the scenerio given by Gary Krakow.


Do you think this or any other really will be a "Linux for the masses"?

If being "for the masses" means a DUMMIES level install capability, then YES! SuSE and Mandrake are already at the level of ease.

If being "for the masses" means high quality Office apps and other apps in niche areas, then YES! With the advent of StarOffice 1.0, or its OpenSource equivilent, OpenOffice, that area is well covered. Quanta, QCad, Gimp, Maya, etc..., are examples of other areas. For developers, the data aware widgets in QT 3.0, part of KDE 3.0 and KDevelop 3) means that VFP-like front ends to a PostgreSQL or MySQL backend (if not Oracle) are here now. Even the previous versions of KDE and QT are good at GUI-RAD, as evident by the 20,000 open source projects on SourceForge, with 3,500 of them being KDE apps at or near completion, or already into maintanence mode.

Linux for the masses is already here: SuSE 7.3 or higher, or Mandrake 8.2 I haven't used RH in four years so I can't say anything, good or bad, about it. I've heard from those who switched from the latest RH to SuSE 7.3 and they say SuSE blows RH away. ??? But, as there are folks who can't even load any OS without messing up. That is why a level playing field with equal access to the OEM PC vendors is important. With certain national hardware vendors making commodity PC available at firesale prices, sans OS, people are beginning to see cost of the Microsoft Tax in their purchases of PCs. Combining a $390 PC with a $40 personal SuSE or Mandrake, or using a friend's copy, legally, will make a big impact when they notice that the alternative is paying more for the OS than the PC.