SUSE Linux 10.1 Final will be released on Thursday, 11th of May. linky
Ive been using release candidate 3 for a while now , I recon its going to be great when all the multimedia stuff is out on the source servers.
If it comes out on time, will try and get a copy along to play with at mojos. Looks like they’ve changed a fair amount since I last had a serious play with 9.x.
SuSE is now very sophisticated , not everything works directly out of the box , but with a little Googling and common sense, a very usable general purpose system can be quickly achieved , I use the GNOME desktop and I find it quite intuitive, not being a gamer I can’t comment on that aspect but I believe that there is some way to go.
There is a strong torrent following with very reasonable download speeds available.
It’s out! Their servers are struggling, but I managed to get the torrent files and they’re slowly trickling down now. Will bring it with me to mojos if anyone wants to try it too… I’m downloading the i386 set and the non-OSS addon CD.
torrent links and more
After lot of work and several delays, we proudly announce the
availability of SUSE Linux 10.1. In tribute to 42 and as today is the
fifth anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams, we dedicate this
release to him.
…
http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse-announce/2006-May/0003.html
regards
Sir Ulli
Applying delta files to RC3 ISOs as I post. 
for Info, the torrent link
http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-10.1/SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-x86_64.torrent
get all 5 CDs for the X86-64 Version
…
regards
Sir Ulli
Ok… I didn’t manage to finish downloading it before mojos, but did get it shortly after and have finally installed it on a box to try out. I installed the 32 bit version on a tbird athlon 1400, 512 MB ram, 80 GB HD, TNT2 Ultra gfx, sblive and 3com gigabit NIC. Far from a modern gaming system I know, but it’s not yet give away material. All hardware was detected correctly and functional.
Installation is not significantly different from previous versions with a comfortable yet powerful graphical installer. Before I started, I resized the existing windows partition to half the disk, leaving the other half for suse. The installer decided it wanted it all, and defaulted to wanting to delete the windows partition. A few clicks later I told it to leave it alone, and use the unused space.
A screen came up with desktop choices, I went for gnome as previous experience showed that kde annoys the hell out of me. Gnome was at the top of the list, not that it was given preference and may just be alphabetical sorting. I then had the option to set any other packages, so I selected KDE anyway (just to see if it has changed since I last looked) and some othe random stuff.
Install took a long while, but the box did have an early 8x CD-rom drive in it. There was a weird reboot after CD 1, but I wasn’t paying close attention so don’t know if it was intentional or a crash. It just resumed and kept going.
After the file copy was done were the usual options of setting network, hardware, graphical settings, root password and user config. Pretty straight forward. Optional software update was offered too, but maybe ntl or their servers were feeling slow so I skipped that part.
Soon enough I was at the desktop. The gnome taskbar has quite a similar feel to the windows one, but I haven’t played with it much yet. I quickly ran openoffice, which turned out to be a novell cusomised version with a slightly slicker front end than the standard version. Firefox is much the same as windows version, even the plugins worked. At least, adblock did which is the only one to die for.
The feel of the box in terms of speed wasn’t great. Windows definitely feels more responsive. I don’t know what stuff suse defaults to running on an install, and I know my windows install is fairly tidy. I think I higher spec box would run it happily, particularly if you have more ram.
So overall impressions are this may swing be back from ubuntu as my fave desktop linux distro. I only went ubuntu in the past as suse were very much kde biased. But suse is a better developed comprehensive package, as opposed to ubuntu’s relatively narrow focused approach.
Every time I try a linux distro, it is better than the last. For as long as I game, I’m not ditching windows. But this does swing me a little further over to possibly having a dedicated non-gaming desktop.
Just to add to that, I installed on a shuttle that was ready for a rebuild anyway intending to wipe the Windows install but since the installer decided the best option was to resize the final partition to create free space, I opted to see how much damage it would do 
The answer was none - I now have a perfectly operational dual boot system.
The ‘weird reboot’ after CD1 is intentional BTW.