I have been running openSUSE since it's release Nov 12th 2009. I started with an existing version of openSUSE 11.1. I typically format / and leave /home alone (as that is where all my documents and music and so on are). This is what I did for openSUSE 11.2. I set root to be formatted to ext4 and /home since I left it alone, stayed at ext3.

Since I have been running openSUSE 11.2 I have had very little problems with it. The saying "it just works", for the most part is fairly accurate. Ofcourse, I have had the occasional application crash, but then that is the reflection of the application, not so much openSUSE. My desktop of choice is KDE. I have had the widgets, panels and KWin itself crash. These were fixed very shortly there after by KDE, which means the rpm's were available shortly as well.

The one issue that had me scratching my head for a bit was Firefox kept crashing at one point. It would barely load up. I tried Firefox safe mode, and got the same results. After a bit of investigation, it turned out that it was the gecko media player, that was causing the crash. A simple uninstalling of this media player fixed Firefox.

I tend to run my system quite hard. I have 3 different profiles of Firefox up simultaneously, OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet, xchat, and at least one media player (amaroK or Kaffeine). Usually the other 2 profiles are viewing flash sites, which requires npviewer.

I have a Dell Insperon 530N, that originally came with Ubuntu. It wasn't long till I took Ubuntu off. I even tried Ubuntu Ultimate Edition. I must say, if I was going to go Ubuntu, I would go Ultimate Edition. I also tried Fedora 10 a bit ago. But I really like the way openSUSE does things. Zypper has to be the most powerful package manager there is. Smart package manager is the only one that holds a candle to zypper. Smart's detraction is that it's written in python, so if you break python, your left with out a package manager. Zypper has a GUI module in YaST, interestingly enough called Software Manager. I enjoy how you can add views, change the views around and customize the Software Manager. Writing ycp code is not that hard either, should you want to add your own application to YaST. To me, ycp was easier than bash.

Since I have been running SuSE/openSUSE since 9.1, I feel this is the best release to date. Now I'm not knocking other distributions. Ubuntu and Fedora are fine distributions. It was little things that I was used to that annoyed me. My philosophy is, use what works for you. But I am very impressed with this release of openSUSE.

Jonathan_R formerly known as linux_learner