One of the first things that I have noticed after booting into 11.0 is that there is no floppy icon on the desktop like it used to be on 10.3. Now I am not going to make a big deal out of that. I do not use the floppy much any way. Although I would say that the floppy icon never bothered me and it was kind of nice to have it up there. For some reason I think that having three icons looks better than having just two. So I was a bit surprised to see that there was not floppy icon there.

Now I am a big torrent user. I run this computer 24/7 much for the needs of file sharing. Suse is a stable platform to do that. 11.0 is not different. It runs great and I am very satisfied with it so far. Although I noticed that in 11.0 there is a new bitorrent application called monsone. I have never heard of monsone even though I actually spent some time looking on the net for an alternative to the one that I use a lot, which is Ktorrent. Now I have been using Ktorrent for a while now and it works great. I have nothing to complain about it. Except for one little tiny detail. The version that came out with 10.3 had this little red and blue icon and I did not like it a lot. There were two arrows joined together, where one was pointing upwards as to present uploading and the other one was pointing down as to present downloading. Now there is just one arrow, which is light blue and is pointing down. I like it some what better! Although there is still room for improvement…*caugh*. The other thing that I would complain about Ktorrent and I know that this is an issue that suse users might not be interested in since it is not directly liked to Suse but the plugin that displays statistics about the network speeds seems not to be as good as the one from the previous version!

The last thing that I am going to address now is yast. The previous package manager in 10.3 had a few bugs in it. I am sure that others had problems with it. So I am not going to discuss it right now but I am going to say that to me it look 100 times better than the one in 11.0. The one in 11.0 works so much better but it does not sport a good look. I first started using suse with 10.3 and yast was one of the things that won me over to suse. It looked better than any package manager in any other distro that I have used before.

All in all I think 11.0 is a good step in the right direction. I am going to stick with suse at least in the near future. I have no doubt in that. It is a good distro and 11.0 makes me like it even more. So keep up the good work guys!

The survey should ask a few more detailed questions and include comment areas, so that these experiences can be captured in the survey.

Other than that, I’m impressed by the installer, the over speed, and the professional look of 11.0. I’m hopeful that 11.1 will solve my problems so that I can move on to the next version.

However, it is very apparent from all the bugs for it that the switch to the iwl driver for the intel wireless chips (3945 in particular) was premature. Simply way to many problems for it to be the “default” driver. SuSE even went so far as to remove the older ipw from the distro entirely, which I think is father foolish. Just because something is “unsupported” doesn’t mean your users don’t want access to it.

The continued lack of smbmount (started in 10.3) is still a sticking point with me. I have to connect to a Netapp Filer and EMC NAS at work, and they have buggy software whose fixes have not yet been properly distributed. The CIFS drivers in openSUSE fail and report a LOT of bad data in the connections. The smbfs drivers don’t. Thus, once again, I am forced to “roll my own” because the smbfs drivers are not supported. I say, “Who cares?!?!?!” This is an open distro. If I wanted support, I would buy the Novell Desktop. So why the big problem with making older stuff available – maybe even in a “Retro” repository?

On a related note – a lot of my negative experiences have come from the fact that I upgraded, rather than installed fresh. The fillup templates really do need to be applied, even during upgrades, as leaving all the old configs in place has caused so many problems, especially with the switch to iwl drivers. Doing so forces a ‘reset’ to default configs. Once I deleted my old network ./config and ./dhcp config files and replaced them with copies from the fillup template, things got a lot better. No clue why, as I didn’t have anything esoteric in there.

Given that laptops are expected to (or already have) outsold desktops (at least in the US), we really need to be more careful about things like wireless, upgrades, etc.

Because I use multiple hard drives I would like to see the name of the OS on each drive (if detected) along with each drive number.

I would also like to see the OS name and version number on the login screen..

Have had 0 problems logging into gmail, jib jab (once). But then again, I’m mostly a web surfer. Did you try Firefox 3.0.1 because that’s the browser I’m using. Hope this helps.

For a atheros wireless card the ath5k now works very well so you dont need de madwifi

There are no gspcav1-20071224 rpm so i compiles them and installed them the webcam works fine

I have acpi_os_name=Linux and acpi_serialize on the command line when the computer boot.

and now all works well