I have used Linux versions casually and professionally since 1995 with various dry spells of mandatory winders use. I just got off a dry spell and had this low-power Acer Aspire 5810Tz-4274 with a 7200 rpm hard drive. The marketing on it was 8 hour battery life, LED screen with a single-core CPU. I bought it with Vista and had to either abandon it, or commit suicide.
A year later, a few weeks ago, I dusted it off and decided to put in a faster hard drive and load openSUSE. I was so impressed. My dog turned into a raging stallion. The installation was flawless, found all the hardware and with no tweeking, everything works. ( well except for some small button next to the touch pad I don’t know what it is for and never used before which hard crashes the system.)
I could swear this laptop runs as smooth as an Apple. No command-line tweeks, hunting for modules, etc. Just install and use. Winders would crash this laptop if I ever let the screen saver come on. It would slow to a crawl any time it felt like it, and then stay that way for up to 10 min.
I haven’t done anything even remotely crazy like compiling software off of sourceforge or run or compile anything that needs real horse power, so I can’t vouch for anything really fancy. I am just going to be a normal user for a while, take advantage of my five hour actual battery time, leave my newer winders laptop at home to collect some dust, or let the cat use it, and enjoy life for awhile.
I hope the opensuse team gets to read this. I want to sincerely thank then for a job well done.