Edit: Thanks Miguel, it’s indeed RC1+. 
I was bored over the weekend. Really bored. Kinda had a little flu, so couldn’t go outside… What does one do then? Yeah, check out another distribution.
Decided to give OpenSuSE 11.0 a spin – wasn’t terribly amazed by the 10.3 release, but really curious to see what they did with KDE 4.x. Long story short, they did quite a nice job polishing it to look familiar to KDE 3.5.x users. Too ‘familiar’ and not enough 4.x’ish for my liking, but kudos to them – almost everything worked like you would expect it to work. Played around with it for like an hour, then decided to give KDE 4.1 Beta 2 a spin. What really, really rocks about OpenSuSE these days is their one-click installs. Went to the KDE4 Wiki page, clicked on KDE 4.1 Factory and off it went to download and install. One logout later I was greeted by Beta 2 – and it even lost the greenish SuSE polish, which I wasn’t terribly sorry about.
I don’t really get what people like about the Aya theme over Oxygen – the latter looks totally gorgeous. Transparent Plasma Panels? Check. Eye Candy everywhere? Check. Maybe it’s just me, but I just dig the black style of the Oxygen theme. Probably Aya just looks a bit more familiar. Check out this screenshot (click for full size). The only thing that’s kinda messed up are some of the Tray icons. Some of them are … garbled at the bottom. Didn’t have time to check why.
As far as functionality goes, I switched to 4.1 fulltime now. Everything I need for my daily work is there and stability – at least with this SuSE build – was really nice. Ok, I had some Plasma crashes here and there (maybe two over a full day worth of work?) and when I tried to download new widgets via DXS they … well… downloaded, then crashed Plasma and were nowhere to be seen again. Only had the option to uninstall, but they would never show up in the ‘Add Widgets’ menu. No biggie and didn’t investigate further, probably some version mismatch stuff or something.
Speaking about OpenSuSE in general… 11.0 seems like a solid release to me. In 10.3 Zypper just sucked. Totally. Waiting 5 minutes before it had even pulled together it’s repository caches was unbearable. It’s a lot better in 11.0, not as fast as apt, but almost there. The new installer looks really nice, even though functionality hasn’t changed much. But I guess there wasn’t much to change, it always just worked. After installation you don’t have to fiddle around much with repositories, the first time you order it to fetch upgrades Yast automatically asks you to configure repos. Packman is there, Nvidia/ATI are there and also Build Service repositories are just one click away. Pretty cool.
What wasn’t so cool was that I had to dust off ye’olde ethernet cable since the installed kernel came with the ath5k module for Atheros WiFi Connectivity, which seems borked. It loaded ok, recognized the card, but refused to find any accesspoint in range, let alone connect to anything. One blacklisting and installing the MadWifi drivers later WiFi was back up. Small annoyance, still I hate to throw cables around my appartment.
But actually these days… It doesn’t really matter anymore whether you choose OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva or any other ‘big’ distribution, seems like they all pretty much work outta the box. Personal choice I guess and the how and why they chose to polish/brand their desktops. For me personally it’ll be pretty hard to choose once the final KDE 4.1 editions of Mandriva and OpenSuSE come out. Or will I go for the – if they choose the path they did with the 3.5.x editions – pretty vanilla Kubuntu desktop? We’ll see.
