well, what the heck

No time like the present. Decided to go ahead and download the openSUSE 12.1 KDE .iso. I burned the image to a CD using K3b in Mepis 11.

The live CD booted up fine on my Compaq Presario CQ56-219WM notebook. Here's a shot of the default desktop:

openSuse 12.1 comes with KDE 4.7.2; here's a small sampling of the included applications:

- Firefox 7.0.1
- Amarok 2.4.3
- Gwenview 2.7.2
- LibreOffice 3.4.2

Midnight Commander was also included, which I thought was a nice touch.

The first time I tried to open LibreOffice from the live CD, I got the following message:

"JRE Required -- LibreOffice requires a java runtime environment (JRE) to perform this task. Please install a JRE and restart LibreOffice."

But after I closed that message box, LibreOffice Writer opened up just fine. I also tried Calc for good measure; no problems starting it up.

Here's a shot showing a few open application, and the default Kickoff Application Launcher:

I really dislike that Kickoff thing, and of course I changed to the Classic menu style, so here's one more screenshot:

openSUSE 12.1 KDE didn't run especially fast on my notebook from the live CD, but it wasn't bad. I'm sure it would be much faster from a flash drive, but I wanted to see how things went with a CD. They also offer a GNOME CD .iso, as well as a DVD .iso. See this page for download options.

Not a bad experience, just playing around with a live session! Had no problems with the internet connection (wired), with sound, or with anything crashing, but it isn't like I put it through any rigorous tests. As I've mentioned before, I'm no distro reviewer, and I don't really start thinking that I've gotten a good feel for a distro until I've been running it for several months, or over the course of a couple of releases, at least. Dedoimedo posted some less-than-positive reviews of the 64-bit and 32-bit KDE versions. looking at live and installed sessions; follow those links if you're interested, although you might be turned off from ever trying the distro!

openSUSE has new releases every 8 months, with support for 18 months, as I understand things.

The documentation I've looked at so far looks pretty good, but you'd expect that from any of the top Linux distros.

Anyway, I'll hold off on tryng an installation for now; I should have more time for that in a few days. Looks good so far, though!

Here's a link to the openSUSE website: http://www.opensuse.org/en/