I recently upgraded a somewhat old system (2007 Systemax Ascent, 2.0 GHZ AMD Athlon 64, NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS graphics chipset) from SUSE 11.1 to 11.2, and it is a worthy improvement over 11.1, and definitely worth a look for a newcomer. Installation is quite simple and easy, anyone capable of installing an OS should be able to figure it out, and hardware detection is quite good. Unfortunately, when you first boot it up after an install using an NVIDIA graphics chipset, you will quickly notice that there is no 3D acceleration out of the box. However, NVIDA does maintain a repository of their drivers for SUSE, so enabling 3D acceleration is as simple as adding the repo, installing the RPMS, and rebooting. Once you have all necessary drivers installed, the desktop is quite nice, although KWin's compositing engine is still not quite as reliable as I would like (Oh well, there's always Compiz!), although KDE 4.3 as a whole is quite stable and ready for everyday use. On a sadder note, KDE3 has finally been removed from the official distribution, although is is still possible to run KDE3 if you are willing to use unsupported repositories. I do not use GNOME, so I cannot, unfortunately, provide any detailed review of that environment in openSUSE. The application repositories are huge, and you will have a hard time finding a task that there is no program for. Hardware compatiblilty is also quite good, although in some cases (such as NVIDIA chipsets mentioned above) you will need to manually download and install a driver, and even that is relatively easy. Security updates are quick and easy with kupdateapplet, and one is unlikely to forget them with its nice notifications. The system is quite stable as well, although I have had Plasma crash from time to time, mainly as a result of doing stupid things, while applications practically never crash or hang up. Altogether, this is a very stable and professionally done system that is well worth a look for newcomers and experts alike.

SuSE's good. I haven't used since 10.2 because 10.2, near the end of its life, made me very angry. The package management tools are good, and the 3-D acceleration isn't hard to setup. YaST is nice too. I got it running DR17 as the window manager, and boy, is that awesome!

it doesn't like sudo - YAY, it's not ubuntu!

On the other hand, it's got a few bugs that float about. Here are a few examples:

- Shutdown/Reboot doesn't always work right (from terminal works okay)
- Amarok on Gnome setup loops infinitely
- Lost my window decorations for no apparent reason one day with compiz! (this was kind of big!)

There are a few others, but they're really quite minor :)
Anyway, still beats windows, and I'd recommend it.

Ah yes, and the gnome + system were a bit bloated. Used about 750 MB of RAM (with normal system processes) (WOW! Not so with anything but Ubuntu or SuSE) After I switched to DR 17, this problem went away :)

Even though OpenSuse 10.1 was a little flaky, I have used OpenSuse since 2006 and I have found it to be a solid, reliable operating system. I am currently running version 11.2 KDE on an Asus EEE PC 701 4G from 2007 and a 2003 Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop and it is perfectly at home on both systems.
When I use OpenSuse I get the feeling that a lot of care and effort has gone into its design and build. The software repositories are very large, and I highly recommend it to new and experienced users alike.

zypper is slow when install package

The Very Best Distro Ever !!!
Zypper Is Fixed Now And It Doesn't Cut Out When Downloading Package
A Perfect Nvidia Grafic Card Work With The Best 3D Acceleration In EveryDistro Even More Than Window$
Speed Secure And Stable
Works Perfect With Almost Every Desktop (KDE-Gnome-LXDE-E17-E16)

Live CD available to get a look at this distro. Full DVD download provides great out of the box experience.
Downloads at: ( http://software.opensuse.org/112/en ) Gnome and KDE desktops are both exceptional on this distro. OpenSUSE, in my opinion, requires a bit of familiarization and new users in particular should review the excellent information and help at
(http://forums.opensuse.org/). Pre- install checklist, help in configuring system hardware, installing software, and answering questions from Noob's to seasoned linux folk's is available. Best community and support around. I have never had an unresolved issue in three years (versions 10.0 to 11.2). Updates, package management, and system configuration is all handled easily with yast (GUI) and zypper (command line). VERY stable, good hardware recognition, and with the huge number of packages available it's hard to imagine a project that can't be handled by this distribution out of the box.Playing
,ripping, copying/backup of cd's and dvd's, however, may need some additional work. Multimedia propietary and restricted formats as well as wifi,graphics, and sound card issues are mostly resolved (again) with a quick search of the forums or query/post to the list.

I have been using SUSE for 3 years, changing from MS Win.... I have tried Fedora and Mandriva and these are also good.
I have no doubt of the superiority of Linux, and this OS in particular, as a reliable and easy to use system.

I have been using SUSE for 2 years now. Compared to openSUSE 11.1, openSUSE is superior. Many bugs in CD burning and KDE 4 were fixed, and I like the new YaST KDE backend. The KDE was good enough so I finnally switched to KDE 4 grom a combination of GNOME and KDE 3. I'd like to see what they will cook up for SUSE 11.3.

Took me forever to find out that radeonhd was incompatible with my graphics card, but once fglrx was installed I have a very fast startup, excellent battery life, and opengl support (finally)

I use openSUSE 11.2 and I feel that it is the best linux distro I have every used. Zypper is great though it is kind of slow. Also yast is very good... though I think it needs to be updated to look and fuction more modernly. I love how it has most of all the tools I need and I wish all distros would have the cnf command... it is great... nice touch. I agree that it feels that care and thought has gone into the system.