For the most part, Gnome RC1 is working very well. The obvious exception is in dealing with printers. openSUSE now lags well behind Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora and even Mandriva in this respect. Hopefully the basic design issues that make the process of adding printers clunky and (particularly for the less experienced user) frustrating will be addressed in 11.4.
However, there does appear to be an annoying, although non-fatal, bug in the printer handling process. The symptoms (at least in my case) are repeated requests for authentication which seem unrelated to the underlying activity. When you finally reach the point of editing the printer name and location, and hit the “apply button”, the “request for authentication” sub-process seems to get stuck in an endless loop. When, in desperation, you finally hit the “cancel” button on the authentication panel, you find that the printer has, in fact, been added.
Can anyone else throw light on this behaviour, or should I simply file a bug report?