The Cynic Says……

Ok, so neither of them have been officially released, thus putting me REALLY on the bleeding edge, but holy shit I’m in love. Suse 11 has run amazingly well; every bit as well as my previous Ubuntu 8.04 installation. Suse seems to have better administration tools and more up-to-date packages. Plus I love how easy it is to add new repositories to the software management tool. Hell, the repo management tool even has a listing of third party repositories you can add from the app itself. Makes it super-easy to add new software to your system without going around the web hunting for it to install. Suse’s package management tool (Yast2) even makes instaling new software incredibly easy! It works as well as Ubuntu’s Synaptic tool from my experience so far. I don’t see any major showstopping problems so far with the 11.0 beta of Suse. I haven’t had any unexpected crashes that are specific to Suse. Everything for the most part “just works”. Suse apparently also does some of their own customizations to both Gnome & KDE along with installing their own bootsplash and login screen. All of which lend to a very “clean” look that most other distributions just can’t match up to. Also for what it’s worth, the binary fglrx driver from ATI’s site worked great, installed without a hitch. Compiz and desktop effects in KDE4 work without issue. Suspend and resume work great as well. This is on a Lenovo T60 with a Radeon X1300. Very nice!

As far as KDE 4.1 beta 1 goes, I’m actually quite impressed. The 4.0.x series seems to be lacking a bit of functionality from the 3.5.x series, but even the KDE group admits that. 4.1 seems to be a bit more polished overall. Installing new desktop themes and wallpapers is as easy as right clicking on the desktop and choosing “desktop settings” and then either clicking “New Wallpaper” to download and install new wallpapers from kde-look.org or “New Theme” to do the same for themes. The nice part is that instead of launching a browser and making you download a file and then importing it into the application or extracting it to a directory (and having to know WHICH directory to use), you just pick the one you like and click “install” and it’s immediately available. Sweet! The panel can now be transparent, which has very little functional use but sure does look beautiful. Kopete (the IM client) looks really nice now and actually supports flie transfers on AIM (this was introduced with 4.0, actually). Works as well as Pidgin and looks a ton better. It also *seems* to support video on Yahoo, though I haven’t tested it yet. Konqueror seems to work pretty well for most everything I throw at it. I’ve even managed to get it working with gmail’s full view by changing the user agent in the options to Mozilla 1.7.3. At any rate, I’m still exploring but I can’t help but be very impressed with it so far. I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back to Gnome at this point.