Fickle?

Sometimes.

I've been using - and mostly enjoying, it has to be said - openSUSE 11.3 since August, and as my main OS for the last 6 weeks or so. To begin with there was the excitement and novelty one experiences, discovering new ways of doing stuff and new stuff that can be done. Speed was excellent to begin with, and every application I tried just worked like this was a windows install (i.e. everything worked just like it should).

So what's wrong then?

It's lost its sparkle, pzazz, speed and reliability a little. I was reading on a forum about which OSs people had switched from before using Sabayon, and he most common comment from SUSE users was it lacked stability.

Well, I'm starting to think my experience backs that up. Gone is the amazing speed, but worse, recently everything sometimes apparently hangs before recovering a few minutes later when I'm using Firefox. having spent a LOT of time in DigiKam recently, that would sometimes suddenly become terribly slow, before recovering after a bit. I'd treated it like a windows PC running Lotus notes and restarting it when things got really bad a couple of weeks back before I realised it would speed back up spontaneously, but neither solution is really satisfactory.

So here I am, fickle as anything, seriously considering the pain of switching OS yet again. I don't really want to, but I'm concerned that this will go belly-up at some stage and lock me out of my system. Maybe I should just suck it up for a bit longer and see how we do. The macbook wasn't exactly perfect in it's behaviour in the beginning either, and it's survived 21 months now, albeit with increasingly turgid performance so maybe I'm worrying about nothing.

Or maybe it's just that slightly suicidal itch that I want to scratch where I just like trying new things. Seeing that there's a new version of Ubuntu available prompted this post, although I would not choose that OS anyway (but Sabayon 5.4 is rather lovely).