OpenSUSE 11 3 First Impressions

Thanks to my 10MB Virgin Media connection it only took a few hours too long to download, courtesy of their traffic management system.

As always I went for the 64-bit DVD version and after checking the SHA1 I quickly burnt it to a DVD+R disk.

If you have used the previous version of OpenSUSE, you will be quite familiar with the installer. In fact it is the same but with different graphics.

I am not surprised that the installer has remained the same because it is quite hard to improve something which does an excellent job, OpenSUSE has the best installer of any distribution I have used with some great options for the more advanced user.

Installing OpenSUSE 11.3 is very quick, in about 10 minutes it was all done.

Since I am a KDE fan, I chose to install KDE. OpenSUSE 11.3 comes with KDE 4.4.4 which I have already been using in Gentoo.

After logging in, I must admit I do not like the default green wallpaper but I do like the performance.

The system feels quite nippy and is a big improvement over 11.2. In fact I am quite amazed with this release. Opening a few applications such as Firefox, OpenOffice, Kaffeine and browsing through folders with Dolphin was reasonably quick.

The sluggish performance I felt in OpenSUSE 11.2 seems to have disappeared and I installed Gentoo in favour of 11.2 for this very reason.

As it happens I wiped out my Gentoo install in order to try out OpenSUSE 11.3, question is do I put it back?

For now I will continue to evaluate OpenSUSE 11.3, I have only been using it for a few minutes but already feel it is going to be a good release.

Time will tell if any hidden monsters await and I will be keeping an eye on the OpenSUSE forums to see what horror stories may surface.

OpenSUSE 11.3 with KDE 4.4.4 (Oxygen Theme and a nicer wallpaper)