Briefly, here's how I've spent some of the last two days: on a 2004-vintage 2.7ghz Celeron (HP) with 3/4 gig of ram, I've kicked the tires on openSuse.org's latest offering and there's good news and bad.
On the bad side, around a half dozen reboots were required for all the hardware detection to appear to have completed satisfactorily. Also, in spite of the networking section getting out to the internet after a boot or two, the app that looks for updates still hasn't seemed to have found any. I'll try the many command-line options soon out of impatience.
On the good side, the interface is slick and many included apps perform acceptably well. Audio CD played back with no reconfiguration, startup chimes and confirm tones were present and consistent, reboot time sped up after a few instances (it might be saving last-known-good-state info in many places), and OpenOffice was pretty quick and stable even during first use setup.
Too early to tell, really, but at the moment it looks like I'd rate 11.3 as similar to other recent offerings from the Novell/SUSE camp: a worthy contender but needs polish. I've not had quite this many bumps even from recent Fedoras, let alone Linux Mint or other Ubuntu variants. Another thing: I'm covering the simple desktop stuff for a reason. If one wants to impress the Windows people who are coming over out of curiosity, the simple stuff has to work. I realize that I could use rpm or yum command lines and that it might be better to do so. But if an Updater Applet is right there in the tray waiting to be used, it should work. And in 11.2, it DID.
Next project will probably be to get the newer laptop thrown together and install BackTrack 4 to the HD and frolic through that famous and extensive tool collection. Oh, and the Celeron 2.7? Back to CentOS!
