I tried the live-cd and after playing with it for a while, I drew a blank. It’s not that there wasn’t any improvement to their previous release “OpenSUSE 10.3″, far from it. lots of improvement like the latest Gnome(2.24.1), OpenOffice.org 3.0, KDE 4.1.3 and much more. It was just that after my first stint with OpenSUSE back in 2006 up till now, I found that I still have to search for a driver for my wireless network card, my screen resoltion is still set up badly and my sound card need some manual tweaks. Of course, I don’t complain about all of this, but to a new user this is disconcerting.
I have been hoping that the next release of OpenSUSE would be a stronger competitor to the leading linux distribution(Ubuntu) and to loyal OpenSUSE users this may be the case, but to people like me who have been using Ubuntu for a while, moving to OpenSUSE seems like a regression. I’ve got to say that this is a personal opinion and others would surely disagree with me. But moving forward, for Linux to be more accepted mainstream, it should surely appeal to the many dissastified Windows users out there and while that is slowly being done, more work is needed from major Linux vendors like Novel, Canonical and Red Hat to polish up their various Linux distributions. In my opinion, its like they are all waiting for Microsoft to come up with a perfect(sort of) OS before they are jolted into action. Now is surely the right time to attract the Windows user base with the “Vista” sting still hurting.