So back in 2004, my wife bought me my laptop for Valentine's day. I know, how romantic right? Well, I was a consultant who lived in hotels all week and had nothing but extra time on my hands and so she knew that this would keep me busy on those nights when I was bored to tears. The problem was that my laptop was 64 bit. At that time the amount of 64 bit OS's out there was absolutely zero. Nada. Zip. Well, first Gentoo came out with one and I learned more about Linux trying to get that loaded than I ever thought possible. Next came Mandriva, then Suse 9.2. I tried and tried to get my laptop fully functional at 64 bit, I mean everything didn't work. No proper video, no wireless, and no DVD playing for me. I was stuck in 32 bit land and was not happy. What really baked my cake was that I went out and bought Suse 9.2 as it stated it had 64 bit support, but it just wasn't really functional. I instead installed Linspire on my machine and watched and waited for someone to make a 64 bit OS that actually runs my machine....and waited....and waited....and now I just have come to the realization that it just is never going to happen.

Enough on that, so why don't I use openSuse? Plain and simple; I hate that I need to download 4 Gig of data for any distro. Plus for all of that, 10.1 just was a nasty memory hog and wasn't very efficient. So when SLED (Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop) was announced this summer, no real bells and whistles went off in my head. I was actually busy trying to help the Freespire community as much as I could and really didn't want to bother with a commercial beast. Well, someone hinted to me that if I tried SLED, my XGL dreams would come true....that was it. I spent the time and effort to download the DVD iso image and set off to see whether this dream was actually a reality.