SuSE 8.0 arrived by UPS this afternoon.

As a reminder, SuSE 7.3 came with 7 CDs and 1 DVD, 5 books and 3 floppy diskettes (boot and 2 module disks).
The 5 books showed their heritage by being very technical, even nerdish.

SuSE 8.0 comes with 7 CDs and 1 DVD, but only three books and NO diskettes.
The three books are definately NOT nerdish, but explain in newbie terms how to install and run SuSE and its applications. SuSE is relying totally on the power of its latest version of YaST2 to autodetect and install any and all hardware.
The one caveat: since there is NO boot floppy, the target computer must have a bootable CDROM. A few pages are devoted to the common BIOS's in most computers, explaining how to configure the boot sequence to enable a bootable CDROM.

SuSE 8.0 is targeted right at the masses of average, non-technical WinXX users. YaST2 now includes a very graphical HD partitioning program that specializes in automatically taking as much of a defragged WinXX partition as you want to spare, and converting it into a Linux partition. Fully weaned WinXX users will, of course, have no difficulty in giving their entire HD storage to Linux. With either ReiserFS or ext3 protecting the software against hardware and power failures, and a Personal Firewall protecting against cracker intrusions, SuSE has become the most reliable and secure Linux distro available. (I haven't used recent versions of Mandrake, but their 8.2 release may be equal to SuSE according to some users.)

The installation process for SuSE 8.0 has been speeded up considerably, with some configurations taking as little as 15 minutes, according to the documentation. When I install my copy this Sunday I will choose the "almost everthing" option. and let you know how long it took. The main reason I purchased the 8.0 release was to get the 3.0 version of KDE, which includs data-aware widgets. SuSE 7.3 was a VERY good release and 8.0 will have to go some to improve the hardware detection and automagic installation features. I'll let you know if it made the leap.
JLK