I should emphasise that this refers to the Live CD version; the DVD presumably works.

The first install failed, with the passwords not being recorded, so that I was unable to login on rebooting.

The second installation enabled me to login. The process had been slow and the post-installation configuration was even slower. The software installer ran wild when I attempted to install the media codecs and started downloading totally unrelated programs. While using Suse, I mounted Fedora's /home partition; I subsequently found that Fedora could no longer boot, as Suse had relabeled the partition.

A subsequent attempt to use the Suse installation failed, as /tmp and /var were suddenly being mounted as read-only!

The Live CD version of Suse has the unenviable distinction of joining Zenwalk as the only non-beta disto that has failed to work on my computer.

Live CD: as noted above, junkware.
Full DVD: a sweet product (64-bit gnome desktop),
very little geek knowledge required to get up and running: nvidia webpage SuSE instructions required to install 3d support (nouveau is still a dog, but doesn't need to be force removed as in Fedora to install nvidia).
motion, camstream, camorama not available, security camera setups just "won't work".
overall systems, graphics, and app responses are all very smooth, with solidity and dependability.
this is NOT ubuntu with it's box full of toys, nor a gaming platform (either of which you could caress it to quite easily, i imagine), but it IS a linux IronClad warship as one would expect from SuSE.
post install idle memory 319.1 MB, swap 0, 5 GB installed.

Although I'm running SLES 10.3 with great success and find it to be an excellent distro, I can't say I am all that impressed with the 11.3 Live CD distro of openSUSE.

With openSUSE 11.2 deployed on one of my laptops I am very impressed and thoroughly enjoy the desktop effects it has to offer.

Installing 11.2 and 11.3 from Live CD on another IBM xSeries server has been nothing but problems. Yast, among other things is slow, I suspect there are issues with the network drivers and/or configuration (of which I'm yet to check)

Personally, I don't think SUSE's Live CDs amount to much. You would be better off installing the full distro directly. However, this means committing to the distro without getting a real chance to test-drive it.

My rating of 3 out of 10 reflects only on my evaluation of openSUSE 11.3 on LiveCD. I have a much greater appreciation for SLES 10.3 and perhaps even openSUSE 11.2, but this review isn't about those distros.

One final note, perhaps it is me, but the CA Manager is no longer available in Yast. Possibly an install fail.

I guess I'm lucky but I managed to install the live cd (KDE) through a VM and it ran great, slightly sluggish (I'm sure part of that was the VM its selfs limits)so I can't dock it there.
Installing and setting up was a breeze, Yast is a great tool and makes adding repos a breeze.

Over all Suse has come a long was since 9.3 when I last used it and I must say its a wonderful distro esp for someone who wants to get their feet wet in linux

This is another one I like. Suse 11.3 works great for me. The only draw back for new users would be getting use to adding the packman repos. Easy for me but those completely new may be a little lost at first.

After adding the packman repos, and of course my favorite media player VLC, all worked fine. No crashes, no issues at all. I think KDE feels better for those coming from Windows also. One feature I like in KDE specifically is what I first saw done in Windows 7. Moving a window to the left fills half the screen on that side, to the right half a screen. Top full screen. This comes in handy at times for me.

I've been using Suse for awhile (since around 2004) but gave it up when KDE4 came along, in favour of Ubuntu/Gnome.

A good opportunity to try it again arose with an old Pentium III/256MB RAM (Fujitsu Siemens S5582) I set up recently, a weak machine by todays standards. In short,

- The OpenSuse 11.3 live CD was a joke on this machine. It took forever (an hour?) to load, and was as sticky as goo.

- Setting it up with KDE was OK, though the machine was slow. KDE obviously would like more RAM - even moving the mouse sent the hard disk thrashing! But the machine worked reliably, even YouTube videos played without problems.

- OpenSuse thankfully also ships with LXDE. I finally installed this instead of KDE. This (like KDE) only leaves 4MB RAM free (about 180MB is cache), BUT has been working smoothly and reliably on this machine nonetheless.

One more point: I don't have a DVD burner here, so I couldn't make a DVD. I burnt a CD, and ran the net install version (using my Ubuntu laptop as an NFS server), and setup worked a treat.

A groan: SaX2 (which used to set up the display properties among other things) has been sorely missed. I tried to set OpenSuse 11.3 up on my 'main' laptop (a Tosh NB200 running Ubuntu) in a VirtualBox VM. It decided my screen resolution was 800x600, and gave me no other options whatsoever. Sure, I could have gone in and modified the X11 files etc. but that's a hassle. SaX2 was so much easier (and worked!). Pity.