I have just gave openSUSE 11.0 alpha 2 a try installing it in a virtual machine. I used the GNOME single CD. Here there are my first impressions:
- The installer improved significantly, with a lot cleaner workflow. There are some minor problems, mainly cosmetical, like popups in the top-left corner instead than centere, but in general it worked like a charm and in 20 minutes I had openSUSE 11.0 alpha 2 installed in my virtual machine.
- The desktop appears identical to the one of openSUSE 10.3, just with the PulseAudio icon in the notification area.
- The gnome main menu didn’t react to clicks on its button. The only way to open it is to right click on the button and choose the open option.
- The menu content is incomplete. For example YaST doesn’t appear there.
- The new package manager interface in YaST-GTK is not well organized, with huge buttons to select functionalities, and it’s very dissimilar from the corresponding Qt version.
- I experienced various crashes of the panel while trying to add applets.
- The international clock improved significantly and it now integrates weather forecasts. However when I was trying to configure it, it just crashed, making the whole panel crash too.
At this point I didn’t went further. The distribution is still under heavy development, as it is natural in alpha phase, and there are a lot of rough edges that makes it not ready for a regular usage.