Posted 10/28/2007 at 09:15:51pm

I would definitely agree that 10.3 is rather underwhelming, but that's mainly because the more exciting features are tucked under the covers. Compiz Fusion now has native support in KDE, and actually works without crashing (amazing, I know). Especially since the addition of Compiz Fusion 0.6.0 last week, the desktop UI has made leaps and bounds. Not to mention openSUSE has SaX2, which I still think doesn't get the press it deserves. SaX is absolutely fantastic with display configuration and takes the crapwork out of messing with xorg.conf. I'd definitely recommend trying out the Compiz Fusion addition and taking it out for a test drive again. It definitely redefines expectations.

Posted 08/23/2007 at 11:34:23am

I was first attracted to SuSE once RedHat went down the Fedora road... RedHat's KDE support was less than stellar, as they seemed to be loathe to use the /opt directory for some reason. I've stuck with SuSE even after Novell purchased them, and despite a few false starts with Zen and Novell wanting to ditch KDE it is still the best distro for my use. I've used Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian (since Woody) but still found openSUSE to be the most polished distro. Encrypted disk support works fantastically and is extremely easy to use. Ubuntu's support is still not quite there, as their bootloader still doesn't appear to like interrupting itself to prompt for crypttab passwords. SaX2 is absolutely phenomenal and means I never have to hack an X11 config again, making multi-monitor and input device support a breeze. YaST2 is still the best "control panel" administration tool I've used in a Linux distro, and is a selling point in and of itself. If Kubuntu fixed encrypted disk support, used SaX2 by default and adopted YaST2, I'd switch over for the enormous software repository and the ease of apt. Until then, openSUSE does a fantastic job. Oh yeah - and SuSE has a login manager that looks like WinXP's. Sounds minor, but that way my family can login without getting confused ;)