I had openSUSE 10.3 on the laptop, but I hate YaST so much that I vowed to put Ubuntu 8.04 on there this time. Then, I thought I’d “just check” the current version of openSUSE. It turned out to be 11.0, and being something of a nerd, I couldn’t resist “just getting the torrent”, then “just downloading the image”. Last night, I looked at the image, kind of sitting there on my HDD, doing nothing, and thought, “Well, I’ll put it on a DVD, just in case.” Currently, there are 56.56 MB remaining before openSUSE 11.0 is installed. I must be a sucker for punishment because it’s still going to use YaST, and I’m still going to hate YaST. I almost gave the new KDE 4.0 a shot because it was an option offered for the installation, but I decided to stick with Gnome because even though KDE 4.0 has some cool stuff, when I test-drove the live CD on my desktop after its initial release, it was still as cluttered as KDE 3.5.

Hee! When the install dropped out of X into a terminal for a few seconds, it showed a little message that said, “Do not panic…” and said X had to do that to detect the video card and install the correct drivers. It’s been so long since I panicked at the sight of a terminal that I wouldn’t have thought a thing about it, but I guess for someone coming straight from a Windows environment, that would be a reassuring message to see.

Anyway, here we go…let’s see whether I like it any better than 10.3, or whether Hardy will end up on there after all! 🙂