Nagios is a quite powerful monitoring tool, and gives you plenty of options for the alerts, dashboards, emails. You can use Nagios to monitor your Linux system, Windows host or your network devices.

With Nagios, you can monitor your system via a dashboard, or graphs, or via email alerts
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Nagios is easy to install, easy to use and have a huge community, with hundreds useful plugins.

OpenSUSE is easy to install, easy to use and the GUI is very friendly (both KDE and Gnome ^^). This distro include everything most people could ever use.

OpenSUSE includes an installation and administration program called YaST2 which handles all system configurations. It's really strong. Zypp, OpenSUSE's package management, has a powerful dependency resolver and a convenient package management API.

And I am using OpenSUSE for my laptop and my desktop.