The installation went pretty smoothly. Some random thoughts:
- There’s no master switch for the Beagle desktop search system. My machine is old and slow so I wanted to completely disable it. I wound up just searching for and removing all packages with the name “beagle” in it.
- There’s no such thing as a “Startup Folder”. The KDE environment just remembers all the applications that were open last time you used it so there’s no need for it.
- Konqueror needs to be simplified. Its toolbars and menus are way too busy.
- Amarok is pretty cool with its integration to last.fm’s streaming radio. I was grooving within 30 seconds flat.
- kopete looks like crap compared to pidgin.
- The flashy new 3D desktop effects don’t work on my old Raedon card. Alas.
Overall I’m really happy with OpenSUSE. It looks great, all of the painful features in previous Linux installs just seem to work here (audio, video, hibernation) and it seems to run reasonably quickly on my AMD Athlon 1800+ machine (which is 3.5 years old now). Kudos, Novell!