In my Linux journey I used almost all the popular linux distros such as Ubuntu, openSuse, Mandriva, PCLOS 2007, DreamLinux, Fedora,Debain … etc. So far I found openSuse 11.1 is far better in terms on usability and look and feel compare to any other distro. It just need a little bit of effort to become the most perfect desktop ever. Read the following blog for the details 
I doubt with the #2. I already installed opesuse 11.1 on three computers and installed in 1600 x 1200 and 1280 X 1024. There is an option to set the resolution higher before you install it. One computer detected it’s resolution at 1024 X 768.
Some dissent for the OP:
While KDE4 lacks polish in some areas, and only recently has returned some functionality missing since 3.5, I have not experienced the instability you claim.
Acroread is in the OpenSUSE repos. Java 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 are in the repos too. Just do zypper search java and see for yourself. Maybe you forgot to enable the non-OSS repo? If you had installed from a non-OpenSUSE package you would have not got notification of the recent update 11 of 1.6.0.
And an editor’s gremlin for you: You label the Skype download page as the Gizmo download page. You should also mention that on x86_64, a couple of 32-bit RPMs need to be installed. Details in other threads on this forum.
i think kde 4.2 is much better than gnome and it’s finally stable enough to give it to anybody.
although opensuse in my opinion is the most usable distro i do think that there are several packages that should be installed by default. like unrar, flash and mplayer with plugins for firefox and dolphin. it may seem trivial for us to install but an average user isn’t able to find software installer which is hidden somewhere far away and requires to add package repos with repo manager which is even more hidden. also dolphin in kde 4.2 should be set to preview and sort files by tipe by default.
almost all of average users would definately find opensuse more usable if these little things would work by default. you can’t expect to move everybody to linux if things just doesn’t work on it. and saying that everyone can adopt it to ones needs isn’t really an excuse because average users don’t want to configure it. they want to use it and that’s it.
Nice tips. Thanks for the info.
I totally agree with you. After using Debian for a year I decided to switch to Fedora. Not because I didn’t like Debian, just because testing was frozen and I was so bored 
I liked to have enhancement updates without having a rolling release distro, but it had many drawbacks. Yum and the “only free codecs”-thing annoyed me (even in the Debian »main« section I found support for MP3 and Flash playback (libswfdec)). I sticked with Fedora for about one or two months, but I had to find out that it’s somehow more buggy than Debian experimental packages (PulseAudio, PackageKit).
After all the experiences I made with Linux I never thought about switching to openSUSE, because Novell got very bad press (although I didn’t find any real arguments against Novell) and I only heard users complaining about YaST destroying their configuration and all these new user targeted tools.
But I thought I had to give it a try after all the other distributions I tried, just to be fair, although I had the feeling to “make a step backwards”.
And I got surprised very positively. It installed the two closed-source applications I usually install on a new system, a MP3-Plugin and the Adobe Flash Player.
It also found the right resolution for my tty’s, so didn’t have to mess around with my menu.list.
I chose GNOME because I’m just used to it and it seems like I made the right choice, the desktop is very well integrated (but all those sub-menus are confusing, so I use gnome-do to run apps which are not linked in my panel; and I had to create a second panel to make it look more like Debian and Fedora).
openSUSE really offers great features, the packagemanager is wonderful (aptitude is still better, but I’m happy with zypper/YaST).
The openSUSE build service seems to be nice, but I will have to take a closer look later.
The package collection is big, I didn’t miss a single application after I enabled the Games BS-repository and the VideoLan repository.
I also liked YaST. Maybe because everything worked out-of-the-box and I wasn’t forced to use my own configuration files. And, oh my god, it had a CLI! So I would have all the advantages of it even without an XServer.
openSUSE even configured my hated touchpad, a thing none of the other distributions did right out-of-the-box and I was able to use it with GSynaptics.
And looking at the forums I only saw friendly people. I also like the Novell account system, it’s similar to Fedora’s, maybe even better, one login for everything.
It seems like I finally found my favourite distribution. When I think about all the scepticism and even prejudges I had before I tried openSUSE I still can’t believe it.
Thumbs up! Thanks to all contributors and involved persons for this great distro. I hope I can join you soon (still migrating my files from Fedora :)).
I’m not sure why, but SuSE always had plenty of ppl on the net, ready to make claims, which don’t stand up, if you know the distro, but sound plausible if you don’t.
They didn’t have the good will that Red Hat had 9 years ago, because you needed to buy a box set, or wait for a download version to be released, instead of ordering from cheap disk emporium.