Things to like about openSUSE 10.3

It works well out of the box. Things it doesn’t do wrong I didn’t need to get round the GRUB bug since SUSE treats PATA and SATA disks as pseudo SCSI disks and nothing gets confused when rebooting. It didn’t kill my graphics card with a buggy NV driver. My Soundblaster Live card works correctly with digital output and everything. My old, serial connected, Wacom graphics tablet just works. Once installed, Compiz Fusion just works. Bluetooth just works. Things it does well Start-up and shut-down of the PC is really fast. There are lots of custom settings scripts built in to YAST2 so no need to hunt round for files to edit by hand. There is a sensible set of applications in the standard build without overdoing it. In particular, the scripts for editing the graphics settings of xorg save manually editing the conf file which is always rather fraught (though there is a problem after the NVidia drivers have been installed, I’ll talk about that in another post). Sensible options are generally chosen during installation. For example, if you change the language option to English (UK) during installation, the locale and keyboard options are automatically chosen as UK.