I started wit SuSE 8.1 after using redhat 7.x. It was a very refreshing experience. And no matter that (open)Suse had some bad distributions, I now use 11.4. I tried other distros (debian, ubuntu, gentoo and many more) I stick to openSuSE.for now.
I have been using GNOME, KDE XFCE and LDXE, my main machine is still KDE and with opensSuSE 12.x I switch back to XFCE for my servers. LDXE is just not responsive enough. Also, I have one very old laptop, which I used to operate under openSuse, but have been using Puppy now because of memory limitations (128 MB)
Rumors are that the deal with MS and Attachmate/SUSE will negatively impact on openSuSE openness and performance. If that seems to be the case in the future, I can always consider switching to yet another distro.
Some remarks though:
- The dependencies some packages rely on are in my view not needed nor wanted.
- If you really want the latest: go for packman repositories and/or compile yourself.
- if I want to install 32-bit packages on an 64-bit system, I will tell yast2 to do so, automatically installing 32-bit packages is just annoying.
- With a “new installation”, your /boot/grub/menu.lst - separate boot partition and different root partition - is overwritten instead of augmented.
Happy hunting, Frans.