My experience with Windows 7 Ultimate N (which I got from my own MSDN
subscription) was interesting as well…
I’ve got 3 identical Dell D610 laptops here for doing some testing, and I
thought I’d try each system out (one Win7, one openSUSE 11.2 GNOME, and
one openSUSE 11.2 KDE) and see how they fared.
The two openSUSE 11.2 systems work pretty much flawlessly. I had a minor
issue with the network manager on the KDE system not getting a default
route or DNS entries from DHCP. All hardware was discovered and
configured correctly the first time.
The Win7 system, however, was a different story. On the plus side, the
install was the fastest Windows install I have done since Windows 3.1.
On the downside, no drivers for the wireless card, no drivers for the
sound card. For the wireless card, the drivers were downloaded and
installed after plugging into my wired network.
The sound drivers, though - completely different situation. It tried no
less than 3 times to download drivers and failed. Eventually I had to go
to Dell’s website and search - the D610 isn’t formally tested with Win7,
but after a little searching, I found that the WinXP drivers (of all
things) were the recommended solution.
So, on the score of “it just works”, Win7 lost out to openSUSE 11.2,
which actually did “Just work” after installing the software.
I’ve got to do a little testing with various software and hardware
components (I’ve got an Intuos 4 tablet with an experimental driver that
I use on my 64-bit system and I need to check for kernel compatibility
and X server compatibility before moving that system to 11.2), but so
far, I like it.
And as a GNOME user, I have to say that I was impressed in general with
what I saw of the KDE setup. I may have to spend more time playing
around with it once I get my systems upgraded.
Jim
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Moderator
