I installed OpenSuse 10.2 to give it a go. It was a pain. Fresh install on my Gateway M675 laptop had some problems, but finally it worked. Once installed and after booting I got dumped to the command prompt after receiving an xorg error. Into Vim I went and disabled the Wacom entries that crashed it and ran startx, which got me into KDE.

Suse looks really nice. The 3-D support worked out of the box for my Ati 9800, the Wacom, even though disabled, worked as a regular mouse with no problems, and the buttons on the laptop, like volume, all worked fine. Then I tried to install mysql, Pylons, and Blogg-x Joomla blog client. I am not sure why MySQL installed fine but could not be started, JAVA was a pain trying to get Blogg-x installed, and Pylons took most of the day. I decided I am a Kubuntu guy and refused to waste my night fixing all these issues.

I wiped my Edgy install for Suse 10.2 because Feisty release 4 was out and I knew the next wasn't far off and I did want check out OpenSuse before I installed the fifth test release. Amazingly, as Suse annoyed me I went to the Kubuntu site a second time and magically release 5 was ready! I just had to get back to Kubuntu!

Kubuntu install was flawless! Much nicer than OpenSuse. Once installed I rebooted and KDE login comes up without a hitch. I log in to find everything works! 3-D support and my Wacom were working without having to tweak the xorg.conf! This is the first Linux install on this laptop where I didn't have to manually configure these two items. All the laptop buttons work and booting is way faster than previous versions.

If you are considering Linux wait for the final release of Feisty Herd, it kicks major ass! OpenSuse is really nice also, just different. The fact that it played the Windows startup theme sound really creeped me out, making it a good choice for work, but for home it's Feisty.