I shall be DLing and installing this tonite... ...can't wait...

I shall of course tell you what I think.

Downloading now... Have been waiting for this release. I have a new machine and haven't put a Linux VM on it yet, was looking at SUSE and decided to wait until it was released.

Hmm, a little disappointed in the look-and-feel department...

It installed very quickly - partially due to the ISO image being opened directly from the hard disk, partly due to the machine being a Core i7 laptop, with 4 real and 4 hypethreaded cores.

The old themes for KDE were "ahead" of Windows XP, but the new Oxygen layout looks very dated (circa 1996), especially compared to Windows Vista / 7 or OS X.

Generally, the performance seems fairly good, Gnome is certainly very fast, although logging on to KDE is somewhat slower.

Playing with KDE for a while, it really is very confusing. The Minianwendungen (Widgets?) are very modern and have transparency etc. The window frames etc. for "real" windows on the other hand feel old fashioned.

The striped wallpaper and boot screen also look very dated.

Gnome looks much more modern, if a little behind the times. A shame, KDE has more potential with the desktop widgets, but the window decoration seems to have gone backwards in time, not forward, leaving KDE looking a paradoxical mess.

A bit strange, that Firefox 4 Beta 12 is the default browser... This is supposed to be a stable release, I guess this is partly down to Mozilla delaying the release of Firefox 4, but I'd still rather see Firefox 3.6.15 as the default browser, purely because it is the stable release, with the option of Firefox 4 Beta... It would certainly make me think twice about using it as my primary desktop.

The inclusion of Libre Office is good - it is also better (although still not good) at importing Microsoft Office documents. Typing in LibreOffice Writer feels a bit laggy, but not as bad as OpenOffice running natively on the iMac, although with 8 cores and 2GB RAM set aside, I wouldn't expect to feel any lag.

Ooh, just logged out of Gnome and it didn't offer to save my document, before logging off! Make sure you save your work, before deciding to log off!

Hmm, just double checked and the VM was giving openSUSE 1 core, so I changed the settings, to allow it to access all 8 cores and it is now much slower! It is taking forever to log on - booting took over 1 minute, logging into KDE has now been going on for around 4 minutes!

On my third re-install now.

It didn't like having access to all 8 cores and hosed the original installation. The next install stuck at 15%. I've now limited it to 4 cores and it loaded ok. But KDE keeps freezing and not letting any keyboard or mouse input (the mouse moves and things light up when I click on them, but the click isn't registered).

Still slow and stuttery, in a way that Ubuntu wasn't on this machine. I much prefer SUSE, but the latest version is a disappointment.

Just compared it to 11.3 running on my iMac under VMWare Fusion, 11.4 does look better, but it still looks stale.

Edit: LXDE doesn't work, the $HOME directory isn't registered.

Edit: And now Gnome has frozen. After having eagerly awaited this version, it is turning into a real disappointment.

11.4– First Impressions.

Hmm.... it's a bit of a funny one this. The OS and especially the updates are excellent but some initial weirdness put even a SUSE veteran like me on the back foot.

Installation: I installed the OS in my usual manner (keep /home but format root, perform a clean installation and import the old user accounts) and all seemed to proceed as expected. The actual install was very quick at around 25 minutes; this was only a whisker slower than burning the DVD I installed off.

First boot: If you're going to have issues then this is where you'll have them. I had more than I'd like but nothing too scary. Most importantly the system had forgotten how to cope with my wi-fi which had to be fixed straight away. This was made all the more frustrating because I had forgotten my router password.

GUI: Firstly I'm going to have to disagree with Dave about the KDE interface – I cannot stand transparent anything and personally think that Oxygen is lovely and Windows 7 looks like a total dog's breakfast. But that aside he is on to something with the disappointments.

Firstly though:

Pleasing things:

1. It picked up the vast majority of my old settings with barely a murmur
   
2. The new default wallpaper, whilst still not Apple quality, is much better suited than 11.3's to an office system (the raison d'être of SUSE).
   
3. Once you turn off the 3D nonsense the OS goes like a rat up a drain.
   
4. The basic system load looks (without actual verifiable data) to be a good chunk smaller than 11.3.
   
5. Changing the colour scheme from “Oxygen” to “Oxygen Cold” leaves SUSE looking jaw-dropping.
   
6. The hardware compositing and its attendant effects (e.g. improved window management, glows, shadows etc.) are a lot more stable – I tried and failed to make them fall over.
   
7. The widgets menu is a hell of a lot less fiddly

Disappointments:

1. For some reason known only to the cosmos the Qt settings had decided that the default user GUI should be “Default GUI” rather than Oxygen and that the root GUI should be Clearlooks. So naturally, two duff settings ensured that certain windows looked, frankly, bloody terrible. A quick change of this and suddenly some order was restored.
   
   
2. The cashew wouldn't move from under the panel and would reposition itself under the panel no matter what I tried. Further investigation revealed that KDE had generated both my old setup as an activity and the new 11.4 setup as a second. This shouldn't normally be a problem but somehow the gremlins really weren't happy so I deleted my old setup and started anew.
   
   
3. The updater (KPackageKit), of its own volition and at no behest from me, started itself and really got me puzzled. It was asking me to update some files and to upgrade to 11.4. It was behaving in a way not dissimilar to a Windows-style phishing scam. Consequently I killed it and tried to find out what was going on.
   It had highlighted all of the repositories as update sources and got itself in a right tailspin. When I disabled the errant repos, the updater started “Rebuilding package details...” and took 45 minutes to do it. This happened the first time I ran 11.3 so I was expecting it; if I hadn't known it was coming I would have been very alarmed.
   
   
4. Libre Office and YaST2 still refuse to skin properly. It's doubly annoying because the oxygen-gtk engine has the GTK programs looking beautiful so I really don't get it tbh. I can stomach it from LibreOffice as they've only just got going but for YaST to look wrong is totally unforgivable.

Verdict:

Whilst certainly no 10.1, openSUSE 11.4 has a few gremlins which really should have been ironed out in beta and for which I'm docking a mark. That said, once you get beyond those fairly minor issues you get a superb distro that works wonderfully and looks gorgeous. I would happily pay for this release and the fact I don't have to makes me a very happy bunny indeed.

Overall a very worthy update of a great OS.

8.9/10