It’s been awhile, some of you may remember me from vir@s’ forum.
anyway thought I would report my experiences lately. As some of you guys may or not remember, I could easily be called a linux fanatic…I started with 10.1 and had to manually configure a winmodem, apart from that I had NO problems since I didn’t use yast but rather smart.
then came 10.2 which worked great but as time passed support was disappearing, no compiz fusion and had to go back to beryl, then non of that and finally the sad end came. 10.2 installed on everything I had laptops and desktops alike, no headaches.
then 10.3 and the evil alsa and almost impossible to get my broadcom functioning on my laptop. I trouble shot also forever, endless problesm, gave up returned to 10.2.
then came 11, sorry, this was almost so bad I actually thought about installing xp on the laptop which came with vista (I wiped that crud off the hdd the first day). It wouldn’t install on the first try, problems with mouse, no wireless, even on the desktop it was quite evil. of course I had to get nvidia from source not the rpm. ugggggh.
I was at my wit’s end, then came 11.1, fearing that it would be buggy and far too soon to install, I was hesitant, but I took the plunge anyway.
on my laptop, flawless install,no start up sound had me a bit freaked, but cds, movies, everything worked fine and the shut down sound played. ndiswrapper took care of the firmware but it did have a problem connecting to an encrypted network. graphics good, the driver provided for nvidia machines works well, no 3-d but no skipping movies either. (I am going to wait on Nvidia for a bit)
the bugs I have encounter is the new kicker, or whatever it’s named now…first experience with kde4…awkward…plus I noticed after adding repos to yast a lot of what I enjoyed in kde3 is no longer availbale, well at least for now, such as the crystal window decorations, etc. also when adding repos to yast had a few errors which said “the key you are trying to import had change…may indicate a corrupted file by hackers…” or some such, I figured there must be a flurry of movement on the servers from devs getting ready for the show so I went ahead and imported the keys…stupid I know, but hey, I my paranoia has chilled out considerably since leaving windows.
it’s sweet looking desktop, seems stable, I am writing this on wireless, my conexant soundcard seems to work fine, though the earphones jack won’t work. I’ve messed with the alsa config file, setting model to laptop-hp, etc, but to no avail.
all in all, I was worried how, with each new version, configuring systems became more of a hassle, oddly the least hassle I had, contrary to most people’s experiences, was with 10.1 and 11.1 guess that .1 is the lucky charm.
so in summing up, if you have the same laptop as me, this version works…and it is still a few days before official launch.
and one question, what’s up with smolt? took me to a fedora site, google, figured it out, but seriously, it did give me a fright.