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I agree wholeheartedly with exploder.

I helped test openSUSE 11.2 and it was both addicting and rewarding.

I just spent a little time with OpenSuse 11.2 on my main computer. Overall,..I found it very impressive. Being limited somewhat by being on dialup, I really appreciated that there was a large supply of apps already on the install DVD (and one could choose extras after initial installation). I added the Xfce desktop, Wine,...and several other apps. All went well except my Xfce desktop didn't quite have the ability to close or move the windows. Then my panel somehow disappeared, and no matter what I did,...I couldn't get it back. No problem,...I found I could work around that,..and maybe un-install Xfce, and re-install later. Then I discovered the "show-stopper" for me. No flash. Not even a Swfdec on the install DVD to add. (Gheeesh, I am just TOO used to Debian). I tried to do the "One Click" install from the net for Flash,..but I'm on such a tight schedule right now, and have limited time. On dialup, downloading (even from the "One Click" method) would have taken me forever. I just put Mint 8 back on,..and sighed a sigh of relief. Mint is a dialup-ers best friend.

waldo wrote:Recently I loaded a drive with OpenSUSE 11.2 with KDE 4.3.1. Over the years, I've tried OpenSUSE (and SuSE before that), and always felt it was too cumbersome to be a good desktop system. (I usually use OpenSUSE to set up servers for clients.) This new version is different. OpenSUSE's implementation of KDE 4.3 has brought the desktop together and it is impressive. I don't think it's quite as friendly as Mint for the new Linux user, but with basic skills, you will find it an excellent choice.

You do have to select to install the non-open codecs, but they make it easy. The closed source nVidia driver is only slightly more elusive. OpenSUSE has a web site with an automatic web based installer. It works, but you have to know to look for it.

It is slower to boot than Mint (and much slower to install), but faster to load most programs. It appears to be a rock solid professionally done distro.

I would say that openSUSE has been the only distribution I've used so far (except for distributions like Gentoo where you're the one in charge) that has proven to be a solid KDE-desktop.

Before openSUSE 11.2, all I had seen of the KDE 4-series was the Kubuntu-releases, which somehow managed to leave me unimpressed with the recent KDE-developments and crawl back to my Gnome/XFCE-distributions, but if nothing else openSUSE 11.2 has taught me that you can build a stable and lean desktop around KDE 4.

I'm not sure why so many distributions almost seem to butcher KDE. If they're not able to improve a desktop environment, they're most likely better off leaving it with all the defaults or simply picking another environment, rather than releasing a half-finished stepbrother of their main distribution (which has been the impact Kubuntu has had on me, fair or not).

I really hope the Linux Mint team studies how the people over at openSUSE have used the technology provided by KDE, and at some point release an official KDE-edition, complete with all the Minty goodness we've come to expect.

OpenSUSE is the only linux distro I cannot get to run on my main computer. It ran fine on the live CD and I loved it. I was very upset with the release of Karmic 9.10. It broke several things in my system that ran fine in Jaunty. I had no serious problems fixing the issues but found it very frustrating (it made no sense to me that my printer would work in 9.04 but not in 9.10). It also seemed to me that Ubuntu does not care about the appearance of the system at all. The wallpaper and themes released in Karmic were atrocious (IMHO). So I did a clean install of OpenSUSE only to find out that it hated my Radeon graphics card and would not boot without manual commands. I was angry (why would it work on the live cd but not after install?) and reinstalled Ubuntu. The ATI graphics cards are very common and I don't understand how a distro supported by Novell cannot get their product to work properly with them (Especially since Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Etc. work fine). If it had worked, I would probably be using SUSE now, and would have bought a few t-shirts from their store!