[CS-FSLUG] Suspicious SUSE issues

[N. Thompson]

I recently tried the SUSE 9.1 Personal edition iso that was freely 
downloadable from SUSE, aside from the USB issues it worked flawlessly. Then 
I added a mirror of the professional edition to the sources so I could get 
access to more packages and I found that because I was running two different 
sources with the same packages the two would conflict sometimes (perhaps the 
personal edition CD is more up to date).

Having found that the two sources were conflicting I downloaded the iso image 
for the professional edition net installer and installed SUSE from there, it 
took nearly three hours and when I finished I was very disappointed to learn 
that my sound card wasn't supported and I had a lot of trouble getting the 
display to work with the NVidia drivers.

Now I'm wondering why I didn't have any of these issues with the personal 
edition, I've always suspected that distributions which stand to make a 
profit sabotage their free versions to convince people to purchase a copy 
instead but since I can't be sure I have no idea whether I want to save for a 
copy of SUSE Linux or not. I got the free SUSE resource kit which comes with 
SUSE Linux 9.1 professional on DVD but I don't have a DVD drive so I cannot 
find out for myself whether the issue lies solely with the free version of 
SUSE 9.1 pro or if the personal edition simply has better hardware support.

I was wondering if someone in the list would know whether the free FTP version 
of SUSE Linux does actually differ from the boxed set in any way, and if not 
then why did I have better luck installing and setting up the personal 
edition then the professional (ftp) edition?