If you do not like KDE in any way shape or form, you should be warned right now, SuSE is thick with K stuff. The documentation is KDE-related material, and the interface SuSE is pushing it clearly KDE2.

You don't need a call from the clue-phone to figure this one out, either: GNOME is not even a part of three of the four installation options. If you install Minimum, Default, or Default with Office, GNOME is not installed. This is the first time I have seen a commercial distro shut one of these two environments out of a base installation, and it was surprising to say the least.

Before the villagers march up to the SuSE castle, GNOME is included in the "Almost Everything" option, and it can always be installed as a separate package set later.

From an administrative standpoint, certainly the addition of Online Update to YaST2 (SuSE's native GUI-based admin tool) is the best new feature. This tool is a lot smoother than Red Hat's Up2Date tool, in that you don't have to register or pay to use it. It's not as automated as apt-get, but for periodic update checks, it's a nice tool to have.

Printer management is ridiculously easy with the CUPS admin tool, and the installed XFree86 4.0.2 handles fonts very well.

In all, this incremental upgrade of SuSE has really fleshed out an easy-to-use Linux platform without sacrificing any of the power under the hood.

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