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