Well, I installed SuSE 10.1 Beta 1 and the latest daily build of Dapper today, so I thought I’d post a few quick observations before going to bed.
SuSE was first, and graphically, its still closely resembles 9.3 and 10.0. Unfortunately, the one feature that I was interested in SuSE for (the wpa integration) was horribly broken for my laptop. NetworkManager did not run by default, and the drivers for my wireless card would not load. This was a major showstopper for me. With the exception of NetworkManager, SuSE was relatively stable for a beta release. The KDE desktop was cluttered as always, and this seems to bother me a lot more than it used to. I gues GNOME is starting to grow on me. I didn’t have enough disk space for both Desktop Enviornments, so I decided to go with the default. My next test of SuSE (either beta 2 or 3) I will definitely use GNOME.Dapper, on the other hand, was extremely unstable. (I DO realize this is an Alpha release, though) X would not start when my system first booted, and I had to drop to a command line to generate an xorg.conf file that would make my computer happy. For some reason, I did not have proper permissions for my home folder, and I could never make the computer happy in that respect. It was a long while before I managed to get into GNOME as a regular user, and then many of the packages seemed to be missing that usually accompanied a default install. I installed banshee via apt-get, but it would not start up, no matter what I did, and the network gave me some trouble at first. I then decided to try out compmgr with my ATI 9000 to test out the new X.org 7.0, but the results were dissapointing.
At the moment, I’m still leaning towards Ubuntu, because I know it will be much more stable when it finally ships. (Also, I was using a nightly build instead of a Flight CD, which will always cause trouble) Also, SuSE (at the moment) does not support my wireless card at all, when the 9.3 release supported it out of the box.
My next installment will be with SuSE 10.1 Beta2 and Dapper Drake Flight 4 (I will make sure to use an official alpha snapshot next time to ensure better stability)