SUSE 10.0, opinions anyone

What do folk here think of SUSE 10.0? Yesterday I decided to put it on my (old) laptop, which I now use pretty much exclusively for trying out different distros. I did put Mandriva 2006 on it briefly just to see if it would take (the last couple of Mandr* haven't liked the slap at all, but this latest version is fine).

Compared to Mandriva, installation took a very long time, though it went entirely smoothly. I prefer Mandriva's parbreastioner, though. I left off KDE altogether, and just went for Gnome, and decided to do without a number of apps and tools I knew I wasn't going to use, such as all printing tools, bluetooth, and some other stuff I have no use for on this slap. This was easy to deselect, but I had to reinstate some of it at the next stage because of dependencies. All the rest went without a hitch.

This is not a fast laptop, and it's getting a bit old, so Gnome is a bit 'heavy' on it, but not unreasonably so. It's not fast, but it works. No problems with battery life, since it doesn't have a battery any more.

The desktop background is a rather striking green and yellow chameleon (a real one), and the default theme is based on Ximian's 'Industrial', both of which I like.

An on-line update got me fully up to date without difficulty.

I was quite surprised to find RealPlayer 10, and the java and flash browser plugins included, this being OpenSUSE, but pleased. They'll all nicely integrated, too, saving me the effort :-)

It's a definite improvement over 9.2-9.3 installs I have, both Pro versions. Very pleasant feel overall, and would I think be appealing to new users, although getting DVDs to play might flummox a few less intrepid souls. It isn't really so difficult, but the usual site where libdvdcss has been obtainable in rpm form for SUSE, packman, no longer supplies it - legal concerns. A pity that this issue continues to be troublesome.

-- Kier