Speaking of experimenting with new distros, last night I installed openSUSE 10.1 on my laptop. I don't keep anything of importance on my laptop, so it was a just quick format away.

It left me super impressed with almost everything, but some things annoyed me.

Maybe I haven't installed Linux in a while, but the installer seemed to take forever. What annoyed me the most was when you get to the GUI installer and it starts doing something in the background that takes 5-20 minutes without explaining itself. This is the part where you can't press ESC to see what's going on. Anything to do with the catalogue, packages, or network took forever while just giving a vague snippet of an explanation.

After finally getting into KDE with some software installed, the first thing it did was find updates. Okay, cool, but the updates it found had all sorts of conflict problems immediately. This is something I wouldn't expect to deal with after just installing some basic stuff, but whatever. I was impressed with the interface for resolving conflicts. Unlike Gentoo, where you often have no idea what the best move is when encountering a conflict, the package manager gives you two or three sensible options.

The GTK-interface Install/Remove Software windows are incredibly slow at whatever the hell they're doing... I'm guessing it's retrieving the huge list of packages. How about a progress bar? Or how about you don't do that and just let me search, then send off that query instead? I think YaST might have a better interface for doing this stuff, I haven't checked yet.

The KDE defaults are awesome and pretty. I love KDE. I wish it had more classy themes like GNOME has. I really think most KDE themes are gaudy. And I think Tango looks (mostly) better than Oxygen. I think KDE icons and themes have too much contrast and saturation, which really detracts from their iconic intention and instead makes them look like real-life objects I have to identify first, then identity the iconic intention of the object. Have much bolder and well-defined outlines would help a lot in this area... but I'm getting off-topic here.

Like Jeremy, I appreciate any tips from experienced SUSE users about getting started.