I have installed openSuse 11.1 3 days ago, and i was able to run all photos, videos, p2p programs, google earth, my 3g modem, read my documents any type, picasa, and search the internet freely, youtube,chat with friends on msn, yahoo, gtalk, whatever i needed i did, that was only in 3 days,
keeping in mind that i am new to linux itself.
I believe that is a success for opensuse 11.1, to make it available to novice users like me.
But still migrating from windows, means trying to get used to the new desktop, handling of things, and accessing my data.
I hope i will be able to run my rest of programs, like autocad, photoshop and HAP.
Glad you enjoy it and welcome to the free world. Yes, with every platform jump there’s some learning and using to involved but after some time you’ll be so familiar with it that it won’t matter anymore.
I prefer KDE as most around here. openSUSE has a much bigger KDE userbase than a GNOME one so you may also want to give it a try, especially KDE 4.3.0
PS: Photoshop can be ran under WINE. Not sure about Autocad
Thank you for welcoming me, i made a search before i decide KDE or Gnome, but because Gnome is much different from windows than KDE, i preferred it, i want to forget my nightmares
that’s flawed logic you know. KDE being a bit more similar to Windows looks than GNOME doesn’t say anything about how well it performs or not. Both KDE and GNOME are pretty rock solid environments and very usable. KDE offers more choice than GNOME though, as in more configurations and tweaks possible and of course offers by default (as in, no third party stuff needed like Compiz) the latest technology in desktop environments. GNOME still has a catch up to do but they’re working on it for GNOME 3.0
It’s even better: you can run both Gnome and KDE, they coexist just fine, running Gnome apps in KDE and vv.
And it’s even better once more: you can install and run many more desktop environments, like Enlightenment, Fluxbox, IceWM and on and on.
No worries about diskspace. Where Vista itself can consume a 32 GB, it will be hard to get your linux system bigger in size than that.
I will try it soon, for sure i didn’t mean that Gnome is better than KDE at all, or vise versa, from reviewing the articles over the net, i believe that both are great, and helps novice to handle it easily.
Yes, both are very decent environments and you can have them both at the same time. You can even have more than KDE and GNOME at the same time by installing another desktop environment along side them, such as Xfce, LXDE, Blackbox, etc
Keep in mind that the GNOME craze on the Internet happened due to in the past KDE being under a incompatible license with the open source one, thus GNOME received much more attention than KDE, also due to Ubuntu and Fedora giving it more attention than KDE. Now that KDE uses GPL/LGPL there’s no reason from licensing point of view to avoid it.
As with all zealotry, both have trolls and often do flamewars wrt which one is better. I always say that people should try them both and make up their mind which one fits them better and which one they like more. Yes, I’m a KDE person because I very much like its framework and how it does things and in my opinion, QT (framework used by KDE) is much better than GTK, both from looks (but that’s debatable as it comes down to taste) and from programming point of view.
Those nightmares will never leave. Giant blue walls with system errors blocking my path while a dark, evil monster called paper clip is chasing me through a damp, moldy dungeon with broken computers laying about. Some burnt and chained to the wall, others lie in the corner all charcoal black, some still digitally screaming and on fire, some just smoking and have given up. All the time I hear the monster Paper Clip yelling in an evil, echoing growling voice. “I’m a PC” I’m a PC" And he is getting closer, and closer. "I’ a PC, I’m a PC… Please love me. Penguins hate you, they will destroy you. Come back to the maze of lost system error message mirrors. Come home to the pretty blue windows…
The machine is an all-in monster:
-NFS + NIS server
-Webserver for development
-File (music, downloads) server
-Desktop for four users (each is logged in all the time, Ctrl-Alt-F* switches)
-It’s up 24/7/365
-It needs to run VM’s smoothly
Before end of year a 60GB SSD is added for openSUSE to run from (have that in the laptop and it makes things superfast).
i made a search before i decide KDE or Gnome, but because Gnome is much different from windows than KDE, i preferred it, i want to forget my nightmares 
X:)