Who here is familiar enough with Linux to help me out

Alright, so I went and installed SuSE 9.3 on my laptop a few days ago. Now, I've worked with Linux in the past (part of one of my college classes focused on it) so I'm not a complete noob. However, I do remember every indtallation I've ever done being, well, a pain in the ass. For all the BS we're forced to eat daily courtesy of the Microsoft behemoth, at least the Windows operating systems generally WORK. With Linux, it's like jumping through friggin' hoops just to get most things to play ball (and I won't even get started on trying to install ANYTHING.) At any rate, I've spent three days hacking through Konsole, hassling with YaST, and trying to find step-by-step instructions online (that aren't cryptic as hell) on how to do ANYTHING in Linux. YaST detects my network card and whatnot, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to get it to just browse the damn internet (never mind my own internal network -- which I read is possible to do, providing I locate and install some package that may or may not even be where it's supposed to be in the cluster f&*$ that is the Linux filesystem.) Is there something I'm not doing here? It seems to me that, if it detects my network card, and is set up to use DHCP to automatically obtain an IP addy from my router, the damn thing SHOULD be able to get online. But no dice. I'll tell ya, Windows gives me little problems day in and day out, but at least shit is named like it should be. "YaST" means NOTHING to me -- "Device Manager" I understand.

Sorry if this turned into more of a rant than I expected, but my question is buried in there somewhere. Even with SuSE being owned by Novell now, it still feels very much "techie" -- not that I have a problem with that (it is what Linux is about) by they will NEVER make any inroads with the general public (beyond being relegated to running on some server buried in a closet) if someone doesn't clean up the damn OS to some degree. I shouldn't have to (if I don't immediately desire) jump through hoops involving access rights and package compiling/installation and console interfaces to do something as simple as browsing the internet.

I am sorry you haven't had the best experience, but my Gentoo and OpenWRT systems all seem to work with my hardware, with minimal to no hacking required. I wouldn't blame this on GNU/Linux, unless you're using some of the latest hardware.

Also, most filesystems that Linux can work with are far more advanced, reliable, and speedier than say NTFS or FAT32. I am not sure if this is what you are talking about though?

Anyway, I am not at all familiar with SuSE. Your network card is there, and is accessible as a device? Try setting an IP manually and see if it works, and make sure that it isn't just DNS (try pinging an outside IP, not a domain, for instance). If it does, then perhaps it is this YaST thing you're using. Gentoo comes with dhcpcd, OpenWRT with some other DHCP client - both work fine for me.