Linux questions

[MattO]

Hello All,

I have a laptop and I am thinking of making it Linux based instead of Windows, but I am a total Linux newbie.
Can anyone help me with the following:
What is the difference between Suse, Red Hat ... etc?
Is there a Linux Office equivilent which can read & write Word and Excel formats?
Is there a Linux Photoshop-like graphics program (with layers) that can handle Photoshop format?

thanks for any help

MattO

[EarthVsMe]

To answer your questions in order:

The Desktop version of Red Hat is slightly more oriented towards home use than Suse, which is more aimed at professional use. There are too many Linux distributions to descibe them all; your best bet is to look at the home pages for a couple of major distributions (Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, etc)

OpenOffice.org can read and write MS Office formats. Abiword can read simple MS Word documents and is much faster than OpenOffice.org. Gnumeric and K-Spread can read MS Excel documents.

The Gimp can read PhotoShop PSD files, but I don't think it can output them. It also supports layers.

Most distributions come with all of these applications. There are also Windows versions of Abiword, the Gimp and OpenOffice.org, if you want to look at them without using Linux.

If you want to try Linux without changing your partitions, then you might want to try Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.com/) , which boots a fully usable Linux system from a CD. Mandrake is supposed to be newbie-friendly, but in my experience it causes more problems than it solve, by simplifying some things but not others. you might also want to take a look at Lycoris. A useful site for comparing distributions and getting brief summaries of them is DistroWatch (http://www.distrowatch.com)

Hope this helps

[MattO]

thanks,

I'll give them a look.