openSUSE

I downloaded openSUSE a couple of nights ago - set my work machine to download on our new two megabit line overnight, and had four ISOs ready and waiting in the morning. Last night I swapped out my laptop harddrive and installed openSUSE on the spare. I love the new graphics during boot and install, but the most of the install process doesn't seem to have changed that much - except for offering KDE and Gnome as choices, instead of defaulting to KDE. It didn't explain to a newbie what the difference was though, and why they really should choose KDE rather than Gnome (evil grin).

During the installation I made a list of eleven bugs, usability issues or enhancement suggestions which I duly entered into bugzilla, and was impressed to see that rate at which those bug reports are being resolved.

Once it was installed I tried to get my wireless card to work. I got ndiswrapper working fine, but openSUSE's network scripts were faulty, so I didn't manage to get connected to the internet. And at that point it was one in the morning, so I swapped the drives back and went to bed.

Once installed there wasn't much visibly different from SuSE 9.2, mainly due to both using KDE 3.4.2, so I expect most differences would come in things like hardware support, and up-to-dateness of the core packages. And things like hal and dbus. I expect it would be a good platform for me to use when developing KDE 4, since I won't have to spend half my time trying to update things. And if I can develop KDE 4 on openSUSE, I can make sure the two work together really well. Which would be nice.