I recently upgrade to 11.3 and I thought I should share my experience with those that are interested. Sorry it is so long.
Before I start I should mention that I moved from Ubuntu to Suse for the stability. I need a productive machine and I can’t spend half my live trouble shooting. 11.2 gave me this and I was very happy.
So before upgrading I decided to update my 11.2 system. As it turned out this was a mistake. The reason for this was because a week or two earlier I had tried and failed to install some app that I could only find in the KDE factory repository and I still had the factory repository enabled.
After the update my system went from stable to very detrimental. I don’t know if it was the factory repository, but that is what I will be blaming until told otherwise.
Next I got hold of an 11.3 iso and started doing lots of backups to an external USB drive. I am generally every paranoid about backups but my experiences Ubuntu made me even more paranoid.
Backups mostly consisted of /home, /etc, /var/lib/mysql
So next I started a upgrade late one evening. During the upgrade it asked if I wanted to modify my current repositories. All the current once were marked to be removed.
I did not know what was the recommend best practice and Google searches did not help. So I decided to edit the ones I thought were important including all third party repositories. The main reason for this was that I was not in the mood to have to do any lengthy re-installing if the upgrade decided to remove incompatible apps because it could not find a new one.
I resolved a few dependence issues, mostly because I had marked PHP 5.2 to be protected as I have not moved to 5.3 yet.
The thing I was not prepared for was the time required. The installer estimated 10 hours to complete. I assume this was because of me enabling all the repositories and instead of using what it found on the DVD it fetches everything off the net. Living in South Africa with our slow version of broadband this was not something I could wait for as I had to go to work in 5 hours time.
So I left it and went to bed. In the morning I check on things hoping by some miracle it had finished, but in stead it had stopped halfway because of a checksum issue. Then shortly their after my Internet died for some reason and I was forced to abort with a half upgraded system.
On the weekend I decided to start up the upgrade again assuming the worsted and that I would have to do a reinstall. To my shock the upgrade just started up were it left off this time with no checksum errors and a few hours later I was booting into my 11.3 system hoping for the best.
At first there was problems and I thought the upgrade had not worked as well as I had hoped.
Wireless did not work. Kmail kept crashing and Kontact ran a Akonadi migration and then Kontact would not start at all. Again I went to bed thinking I would have to spend my entire Sunday fixing these problems, again I was wrong.
The next day I started my machine up and kmail was working kontact was working the only remaining problem was my broadcom wireless. I don’t know what changed.
So before I tell you about my broadcom wireless issue I would just like to say thank you to all the opensuse devs. Even with me trying my best to cause problems it still worked without to many hassles.
When it comes to broadcom wireless. I had the following installed.
b43-firmware, b43-fwcutter, broadcom-wl, broadcom-wl-kmp-desktop
But it was not working and I had no idea. I then tried running /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware.
This also made no difference. There was not even a device in /dev.
Then I Google’d the new boot menu options. I had no idea what the desktop option was, I was just booting off the default. After learning the difference I realized there was a very good chance that because I had broadcom-wl-kmp-desktop installed if I booted off the desktop boot menu option my wireless would work.
So I did and it did.
Again Thank you to all involved. I am very impressed. 
