Installation
Anyone who's tried installing a mainstream Linux distribution on a PC in the past couple of years will know that it's generally painless; installing SLD was no exception. For the users this software is intended for, it will be even easier, as SLD can be rolled out to thousands of installations automatically by an administrator. But it's good to know a non-technical user could install it themselves if needed. SLD also includes other remote-management technology that SuSE's end-user-targeted versions doesn't need, the idea being that the administrator can exercise absolute control over the desktop if he wants; the desktops can even be set on something called Kiosk Mode, which gives users only a narrowly defined range of features. Once the software was installed, adding additional applications from the CDs was also delightfully easy; you select them from a list, and SuSE's Yast (Yet Another Setup Tool) goes and puts them into place for you, adding icons in the appropriate directories of the launch menu. Getting the PC to recognise peripherals didn't appear to be a problem: SLD placed icons for the PC's CD reader and CD writer on the desktop automatically, and was able to burn discs without any setup required; a Palm PDA also synchronised with the organiser software built into the KDE graphical environment without any trouble. More importantly, SLD was able to interact with networked machines out of the box. Clicking on a desktop icon takes you to SLD's LAN browser, which lets you share files across the network exactly as if you were a Windows client. Installing a networked printer was as easy as under Windows; the printer configuration tool found the printer on the network and automatically installed the needed drivers. Ease of use
By the looks of things, SuSE hired an army of graphic designers to pour their ingenuity into the KDE interface, and to some extent the rival Gnome software, giving it a polished, consistent look. One of the default themes has been tailored for those familiar with Windows XP, and offers a really lovely set of icons and window decorations which should, moreover, make Windows users feel at home. One of the more useful tweaks is the addition of a default directory within the user's home directory that mimics the "My Documents" folder in consumer-oriented operating systems. As in Windows, users can snap back to this directory at any time via a button in all "open" and "save" dialogue boxes, which simplifies navigation. This also shields users from the jumble of technical directories that typically nest in the "home" directory. In general, the success of this software is that it acts the way you would expect it to, coming from a Mac or Windows background: the things you would expect to be in the right-click contextual menus are there, the folders act in a logical way, and all the applications -- whether KDE or Gnome -- have a consistent look and feel. One of the nice touches, also found in operating systems such as Red Hat 9.0, is a set of fonts licensed from Agfa that are identical to those found in Windows, so that documents look exactly as you would expect them to. By default, display fonts have that slick anti-aliased look familiar from Windows XP and Mac OS X, although this can be turned off to improve performance. Performance, however, was surprisingly snappy, considering we were using an older 500MHz Pentium III machine with 256MB of RAM; opening and moving windows around, for example, did not show any noticeable performance lag. One complaint we have in the ease-of-use department is the integration of the KDE and Gnome user interfaces. Linux applications are generally built on one or the other, and while we ran Gnome applications without any problem with the KDE desktop, there were occasional glitches; we were not able to sychronise a PDA with the excellent Gnome-based Outlook clone, Evolution, for example, while running KDE; and when we opened links from Evolution, they opened in Gnome's default browser, not the browser set as default in KDE.