The Desktop Experience
SUSE is a KDE distribution. There is no denying that, but considering their recent acquisition by networking giant Novell, the future to some is unclear. As you may know, Novell also purchased Linux desktop company Ximian, the people responsible for bringing their modified GNOME distribution to the masses. So what you have is a very good potential for some excellent work on the GNOME desktop with SUSE... but sadly it hasn't happened yet. I half expected Ximian GNOME to be the desktop of choice with this release. Instead, a very vanilla GNOME 2.4.2 was included (I chose the default installation, so GNOME was not installed by default. It was easily installed via YaST... simple enough for a monkey to install, really). You can definitely tell that far more effort was put into KDE development as there was into GNOME, as it look very 'stock' and unattended to. Granted this software is in beta4 release, so there is still room for improvement, but so far all of the development effort has been on KDE. Even still, it hasn't gone unnoticed. KDE has never looked better.