Having just tried OpenSUSE 11.3

I now wish to install it properly. It's VERY fast in the KDE flavour.

But there's a hiccup.

The full install DVD ISO file is 4.7Gb, which is a lot to download over a 1/2 meg connection. They do offer a minimal install live CD, which I duly downloaded and have booted from now. However although that CD has drivers for the wireless dongle that work in 'live' mode, it seems they don't get installed, so it will only allow updating etc with a wretched wired connection.

Madness.

So tomorrow I shall visit the office (need to anyway) and see if I can download it over their much fatter pipe. SUSE is the same basic flavour of Linux as Sabayon (Gentoo) and while it is less sophisticated in some ways, the sheer speed impressed me enough to want it to be successful. It also has a HUGE advantage over Sabayon 5.3, in that the installer works really well, and offers the choice between normal partitioning (easy to re-size etc) and Logical Volume Management (impossible to manipulate using 'normal' tools).

And that's a big win in my book.

*edit*
Downloaded the 'full' 4.4Gb DVD during the day over the office connection - saw transfer rates up to about 450kbps, which is a lot better than the home rate of around 50kbps. Re-ran the install (slightly different options, same very easy operation) but with the same lack of automatic wireless connection as before. Dug around, opened up the YaST 2 control centre and installed the network dongle for it to finally work properly. RESULT!

It's busy updating now, installing Opera, Thunderbird, Audacity and a few other bits n pieces. Instead of using the proprietary Nvidia driver it's using the recently developed open source graphics drivers, and so far I've liked what I've seen of the display. As part of the update I'm *hoping* it will also have installed the various codecs for handling DVD and MP3 files. That would be nice.