SuSE Ten Point Ugh

It definitely seems like Novell's openSUSE distribution has taken a page from RedHat's Fedora Core. RedHat took their mainline distribution and split it into two - an Enterprise product, and a "community" product. Ultimately their community product had a lot of problems with communication and collaboration, although it seems they've leveled off since. The "Core" distro was really a way to publicly test and iron out bugs for their enterprise product.

10.3 definitely feels this way. Although they have an open Bugzilla, there are lots of bugs that should have been caught. Eclipse doesn't even start, Intel wireless cards have problems with NetworkManager and autoplug, and Xgl has crashes and other weird problems. Novell is even looking to awkwardly cram all of KDE into /usr, like RedHat infamously did. Mosfet blew a mosfet about this layout, and rightfully so.

I had a similar volume of really, really annoying bugs in 10.2, although most were eventually remedied after several weeks. And I even grew to like some of features that annoyed me at first. But the first few months of a release are choppy at best.

So I'll hold off on any big judgement. The problem with Linux desktop releases is that everything is really close to almost working... so close that it's maddening. I think that's why people fly off the handle when a new release comes out - you're so close to having a perfect setup, it's absolutely maddening when a few nagging bugs completely screw it up.