I tried 10.0 eval on my laptop and was suprised how neatly everything worked. Even my cardbus worked with wpa out of the box. Just being curious I downloaded the 10.1 version but it seems less done.
For example my cardbus wasn't found. Good point was newer software.
Is this just a matter of time and a few updates or are the differences bigger?

10.1 is broken. Look to 10.0 or earlier for more polished experience.

I notice the Novell sight doesn't as yet have SUSE 10.1. Is it still in alpha/beta mode? I see so many questions here that I thought it was out officially.

http://en.opensuse.org/Download 10.1 has been out for a while now. Its the GM ( final release)

Cool. What about the broken statement?

The new update method has an issue or two. I haven't found that to be a show stopper since YaST will still install software if needed. My 10.1 install went pretty well. I for the first time installed Gnome so things are different than I'm used to. My only remaining issues are F-Spot that crashes unless run as root and getting an ivtv card working. For F-Spot I'll try its big brother Digikam. I've gotten farther with ivtv on 10.1 than I did on 10.0. Gnome is a little less functional than KDE but it seems more intuitive and has simplified some of frequent processes. I'm dual booting with 10.0 and 10.1 but haven't booted to 10.0 in a number of days. Perhaps that is the best test of 10.1 being ready.

Well, after a some searching I found that my cardbus isn't supposed to work since SuSe doesn't include the drivers for the (popular) atheros cards (madwifi) in 10.1. It had something to do with the state of HAL. This was quite easy to fix by adding the Guru repos and installing madwifi and madwifi-kmp-default packages. (KNetworkManager works like a charm, can't wait to see it in Debian).

I did run into the update problems with the 'new' (for me first) SuSe package manager. I found a howto (http://susediary.blogspot.com/ half way down, it starts with app-armor) with some comments on the problem (http://susediary.blogspot.com/2006/0...gement_13.html) fixing the issues by adding the repos as ZYPP rather then YUM repos.
That only worked half for me so I installed SMART which I find very easy to use and has most of the repros available. I'll stick with that.

Only problem left for me at the moment is I cant find mozilla-dev (or firefox-dev that some distro's have). I need it for some compiling but don't seem to be available in 10.1.

Eveything else is starting to work as supposed, some did need some tweaking.

powada: That's an interesting blog. I just discovered that Google has a version of Picasa for Linux. Who needs F-Spot which I can't get to stop crashing on launch anyway. I like Picasa better than Digikam. Picasa is 32 bit and an RPM is available that worked great on SuSE 10.1 x86_64. If Linux Picasa is well received, Google say they will also release a Linux version of Earth.

Thanks -- George

The blog is indeed very nice. As a new SuSe user it got me up to speed quite fast.