Hi All,
I wanted to contribute an opinion of the new SuSe 12.1 (it has been out
for a couple of months now), but before that, a bit of background.
I have been a Mandrake/Mandriva user for many years and although I have
trialled a few other distros (Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu,
Mint, Slackware, among them), I have always returned to Mandriva for its
outstanding configuration of attached hardware. When doing the install,
get everything you own attached and turned on and it will most likely be
configured and be ready for use, when the install completes. This WAS
my experience, it just worked. Considering that my Linux box was
driving my business I could not afford to stuff around when I wanted to
upgrade.
I recently discovered the joys of mapping under Linux (QlandkarteGT) but
Mandriva was way behind the dev cycle and I needed to be running later
versions of QLGT. So I switched to SuSe 11.4, and in general it was OK,
but the dev of QLGT also happened to be the package maintainer for it so
the RPMs were fresh and slick. And I ran with that for quite a while.
And then I thought, "I'll see how Mandriva is doing lately" and I
downloaded my "paid for" power pack subscription DVD, and installed it
with both KDE and gnome. I was really surprised, I have never seen
anything so bad emerge from that brand before, so much was broken,
including QLGT. It lasted 24 hours. Next night I installed the Gnome
version of the Suse 12.1 release, and I cannot see myself returning to
KDE again. It has a clever blend of conventional desktop with the "App"
style of a tablet or smart phone. There is a small "Favourites" bar
down the left side of the screen, and all of the windows in use are
shrunk and presented in one view, if you want something different
Clicking on "Applications will display the full set with subset options
down the right hand side. When you get used to this, it is a very fast
way to get around. I had some initial difficulty getting my two screens
to work properly, just a learning curve. But hey!, I love this green
piece of German engineering, 9.5/10 from me.
Andrew Greig