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+1 because IMO there is nothing off-topic or offensive in your comment

Who is the one modding valid comments down - I modded something like 5 valid comments on the WM review up again to 1 because they were at 0 .

Actually I agree with you - Novell doesnt deserbge SuSE - getting tarnished by the stuff you mentioned .

Reg Atheros - cant find anything - supossedly the madwifi packages werent included in 10.1 due to stability probs - but look for madwifi on opensuse I guess .

It looks good, and it is still the best distro with KDE around - apart from the rather naff looking start menu.

Agreed and agreed. And grateful that a simple right-click on the lizard allows you to select the old K Menu.

It's just such a pity it has to be tarnished by this stuff, and by politics.

The agreement specifically didn't touch openSuse, so for the people tarnishing because of reactionary politics and jumping ship, that's fine, I say good riddance because they have little to offer and there's a wealth of people in the community still willing to support it.

Novell doesn't deserve OpenSuse.

I'm torn on this one because without Novell, there wouldn't be an openSuse. Suse proper didn't really have the community that openSuse has been able to generate, and I think Novell did raise the bar with their investment in the distro.

I wasn't impressed with overt interference with the development team by forcing the inclusion of the pathetically untested and underdeveloped zmd infrastructure in 10.1. It was a bad decision that every other distro should learn from. Zmd was a political decision that was one-part "force mono whether it's needed or not" and one-part "get this bugger tested in time for SLED" and the worst part was this it offered absolutely nothing tangible for the openSuse community since it was, by design, intended for use in Novell's zenworks management infrastructure.

But then again, the developers (virtually all of whom readily admit what a bad idea that was, even at the time) have worked around it in 10.2, KDE users have the option to ditch the zmd-infrastructure and use a package manager without zmd's resource-sucking overhead mono-dependencies (is that redundant with the first point? ) yet still offers a CLI interface, delta RPM capability, and bi-arch support. Many people fell back to Smart in 10.1, but Smart lacked the last two advantages. Plus Yast has been exponentially improved performance-wise and is more useable than it was even prior to 10.1.

Gnome users are still encumbered with zmd, at least until 10.3 comes out.

Does anyone know if you can actually use an Atheros based wireless card with this thing now?

Not OOTB. They provide most of the pieces, but won't provide the madwifi drivers. Madwifi does maintain a repo though with builds for the current Suse kernels, and they have been maintaining them through the 10.2 test cycle so it's simply a case of adding it as a source (http://madwifi.org/suse/) to install the kmp and remain current with updates.

More info here: http://en.opensuse.org/Atheros_madwifi

I've been using 10.2 since mid-Alpha with constant updates from factory, I'm running x86_64 on a Turion x2 laptop and it performs very impressively. I can forgive the mistake with package management in 10.1 since they seem to have learned from that instead of pretending there was nothing wrong and forging straight-ahead,.