I'm dual booting Vista and Suse 11.1 and Vista is smoother and and faster than Suse. I've been using Suse since 9.3. Is there a better disto than Suse 11.1, one that has a full service KDE desktop? Not interested in any of the mini's.

Define "better".
I am running full KDE on Arch and it is very fast and smooth. I have no intention of trying Vista, so no help there.

I upgraded Vista to Windows 7 on my laptop, both ran 'smoothly'. Next I deleted all partitions and installed Slackware 13.0 with full option KDE and now I have a real 'smoothie' on my hands. Outruns Vista and Windows 7 every day over and over again, so no going back for me either.

Kind regards,

Eric

Opensuse is every think but fast.
She can't .
Why it is good old Suse. Suse short for Susan
Old ladies do not run fast.
But she delivers what she promise a good working OS

Fastest distro's I've used are: Funtoo, Arch, Sidux. All support KDE.

I wasn't suggesting to try Vista, I was just looking for a Linux distro that was better than Suse. 11 up have been somewhat disappointing. Isn't Slack for the Linux purist? I like something somewhat simple. I've tried all the mini's, Mandrake, LinuxMint, Xandros. I think I ready to move on to something else but I don't know what.

If you want a good distro try Debian, or Arch. And if your daring go for Gentoo.

Daring, that's not me. Thanks.

Try 11.2 I'm using it on a netbook, out performs XP and Ubuntu can't comment on vista cos I dumped it ages ago

I may do that. I've liked Suse very much. I tried an early version of 11.2 and wasn't to happy with KDE4. What's your take on "4"?

Can't resist but I'm using CentOS 5.3 and Sus 11.1 KDE 3.5, I like that better than KDE 4. Sus is the better of the two, runs just as well and has the best and easiest installer and installation procedures of all.

Check machine settings, maybe that might help.

suse 11.1 still came with some quite old unfinished KDE stuff (4.1) - last year's release if I am not mistaken. The suse 11.2 that comes out today should have kde 4.3.2 - much more stable!
I like suse because it is solid and not (yet) much dumbed down. It can do everything like arch, redhat, debian and all the other hardcore distros. there are tons of packages etc. Speed is not an issue as I am running the latest 4 core xeon

For my laptops I use Mandriva. Mandriva is somewhat dumbed down but a breeze to install (think WIFI). Easy to use and faster than you can say Schmubuntu.
Upgraded to KDE 4.3.2 with Mandriva 2010 last week and kde 432 appears very stable.


husten

I had "speed problems" with 11.1 KDE; therefore, I changed to Ubuntu. However, last week I decided to try again OpenSUse and what a surprise! I am running 11.2 KDE and it is running faster than Ubuntu 9.1. Try that, try using 11.2 you will see the difference.

I have used many distros in the past and manage systems at work on linux. Here are some of the things I have found:

Ubuntu 9.10x64 - Beautiful and simple. Flash doesn't work well, and virtual box on a 64bit, 8gig system only runs two 2048 meg systems well. It flakes out with a third. I dumped it. Flash is too important. Stability is important.

Slackware 13.x - This is extremely stable, fast, and KDE is awesome. Only drawback is flash doesn't work well.

Suse 11.2 - Beautiful and sometimes overwhelming. It is stable. 11.1 runs Virtual box VM's fast. This is my favorite distro.

Centos 5.4 - Absolutely the fastest most stable Linux OS out there. The package management is simple and concise. Try loading special packages like Dropbox and spend a lot time doing it. This is my work distro because of its reliability, even the graphics seem to be optimized (using native nvidia drivers). Do you want to play DVD's? Just do a "yum install kaffeine" and libdvdcss and many codecs are brought in automatically. DVD's root menus show up and they are flawless. This is definitely the distro for stability and speed.

Freebsd 7.x - I love it. Talk about stable, Centos and Freebsd are neck to neck. It can run just about anything that exists, and you can call yourself a Unix geek by using it. Very cumbersome when it comes to simplicity of packages, etc.. Very fun to use and you learn a whole lot.

Try 11.2...

You might try installing openSUSE with the improved KDE4.3 desktop using a DVD. RC editions are not really a fair test of a distro.

A DVD will give you more control of what you install. That smoothness you seek is much a question of trimming and tuning what you have installed.

KDE 4 does require some learning of new ways, but in 11.2 seems to have been well implemented and might just be good enough for you.