I have struggled with Linux on my Compaq 8510W for many moons now (3 or 4 distros per moon). One sticking point was the suspend functionality---specifically recovery from suspend-to-ram.

After wearing my "Google Finger" to a nub, I found an xorg option setting that worked on one distro, but not on another.

At SCaLE last weekend, I encountered some exceptionally enthusiastic OpenSUSE reps, and I agreed to try 11.1 The next day, I came back to them with suspend recovery still not working. The answer was on the tip of their tongue---Get the 180.29 version of the official nvidia driver.

I did, and now it all works.

Overall, OpenSUSE 11.1 seems quite well done. I'm not used to YAST or the Network manager, but this is now a strong contender to replace the ever-faithful Schizo 0.1

Replace it!
Schizophrenia is not good for your health,you know!

I'm glad that you like it!

kde 4 in 11.1 isn't quite finished yet... and that may or may not be a problem for you. Yast has recently been through big package management changes (it was awfully clunky before when used with lots of repos, it isn't now) and I'd bet that 11.2 will be better still, with fewer rough edges.

NetworkManager is reputed to be buggy. Apart from a nasty habit of drawing boxes on the screen thast it doesn't clear (is that an NM bug? or a KDE 4 bug? who knows?) I haven't seen anything that is clearly a bug, but if that does get you, wicd is reputed to be better. (Haven't tried it.)

The big thing with SuSE is that you do have to get used to the idea of Yast as your 'one stop shop' for admin; if you can do that, its generally good; if you can't get used to that idea, don't bother.