Sorry for taking down the surprisingly popular Stalker reveiw, I think it hit 10,000 views, but I was getting overdue for an update; in the meantime OpenSUSE released a new version 10.3. It has some new features, a great deal of polish and a surprising amount of bugs.

For the past few months I've been a Debian user, so having stuff fail is a bit of a surprise. Especially since OpenSUSE claims to be dedicated to supporting both Gnome and KDE as it's desktops. However, after a few installs it became apparent that KDE is the one you're meant to be using. Gnome works fairly well however there are some issues that should have been addressed...

1. Applications fail that should work better. Azureus crashes on startup, not such a big deal. Even if you can't find a different torrent client for love or money. However, OpenOffice doesn't run either, it starts fine but slows to nearly a standstill whenever a menu is opened.
2. KDE applications get added to the menu on their install, which is good, but they don't start, which is bad. Apparently the menu entry only searches as far as /bin instead of /opt/share/kde where they're actually installed. Putting them there is a good feature, since it allows you to have several versions of KDE installed at once, but it should have been accounting for when building the packages.
3. Evince doesn't render PDF files properly, no matter the settings, the pages come out warped even on the simplest documents. What happens is that the page gets resized to 75% of what size it should be. No matter what size is specified.
4. It's slow, slower than KDE. The application menu takes something like 3 seconds to load.

In addition there are a few things that should be better.

1. The default drivers on this computer are still "nv". Which actually RUN, unlike ubuntu. However they don't render a mouse cursor. Unless you know to edit the xorg.conf by hand with vim, you can't fix that. Since the video card is detected as being a Geforce 7600, someone, at some point in the design process, could have patched it to use "vesa" like the installer does. Which, unlike the Debian graphical installer, runs perfectly.
2. It installs some proprietary software when asked to. But not others, eg, flash but not binary drivers. Either they're trying to adhere to the GPL while packing in as much as they can or it simply never occured to anyone. Also they fail to add mp3 support, which may contravene some reverse-engineering laws, so that's ok.
3. It seems to use XGL instead of AIGLX. Now, AIGLX has lots of flaws, but it's way ahead of XGL, especially now that ATI binary drivers are beginning to support it.
4. VirtualBox doesn't work in KDE but works mostly fine in gnome. It doesn't load the module by default unless specified by hand with modprobe and even if you add yourself to the vboxusers group, it still doesn't access the module properly.
5. Parallels crashes, so much for my gaming method.

Hah, as soon as I get a good converter cable, I'll hook my PS2 in through mythtv. I won't deal with WINE or VBOX until they get them perfect.

Now that I've finished whining, I'll mention the good bits. Firstly install and configuration were fairly perfect. Even when the nvidia drivers failed to render a mouse cursor, they didn't corrupt bash like Debian and Fedora do. Neither did they lock the computer like Ubuntu. Thus, the fact that I had spent $4000 on this machine wasn't a handicap.

I did have some problems hooking up networking, it defaulted to the wrong card. However, firing up the networking wizard let me configure it to pass the networking off to knetworkmanager and use DHCP on both cards. Speaking of which, there's a firewall on by default, which can be disabled with a single click if you're feeling brave. Installing Nvidia drivers and video codecs was very straightforward as OpenSUSE provides an executable on their wiki, running it triggers yast which will update the requisite packages nearly automatically. I still had to edit the xorg.conf by hand to enable the driver but there's doubtlessly a graphical method to do so.

Other applications such as emacs appear to use either gtk or qt depending on your current desktop. This might be a trick of the theme system, however it's entirely possible there's something interesting going on in the background that's making such a thing happen. Someone who can state for sure should feel free to post a comment in reply.

Fortunately, the new scheduler and a fairly recent level kernel means that VMware, of all things, runs smoothly enough to play games. Not perfectly, for general work test of time and even Warcraft 3 the response time is good enough to make you forget you're playing on a VM. The only problem is that even by following the advice in the manual, you still can't make the mouse stop leaving the boundary of the virtual machine window. However, there's a guide out there for Vmware Fusion that mentions the entry for this step.

Beyond those issues, OpenSUSE is fairly awesome all round as an OS. By far the biggest benefit is the presence of easily configurable wizards for everything. Up to an including easy configuration of ISDN cards, should I need one as well as partition encryption. After all, there's no point in having the flexibility and power of Linux if you can't access it. Knowing someone who can access it doesn't count.

One other thing, before you can get online updates or for that matter the update server, you'll need to register online. It won't ask you for anything and registration is free. However, it's almost certainly sending info back home.

Also, just in case new users don't realize. Like other Linux distributions, you need to add a new repository if you want Windows codecs or some specialized programs.