OpenSuSE 11.1 sadness

I was really excited about OpenSuse 11.1. I downloaded it the day it was released, burned it in windows, and installed it on my Linux/experimental computer. My goal was to see if OpenSuse 11.1 can finally be a full blown replacement for windows.

I went with KDE 4.1 for the first install. Yes, I said first. Compared to KDE 4 released with OpenSuse 11 it seemed very stable and clean. I was able to run it for about half a day with out getting any errors or crashes! Then to put it through the paces I tried to set up a Softphone. I found Twinkle in the packman repository and hooked up my microphone.

I was pleased with Twinkle for the most part. I don't think the codecs that come with it worked the best with my voip provider (www.voipstunt.com) but the bitch of it was try to get my microphone to work. Kmix would see it, but the volume slide bar was stuck at the bottom. I found a remake of Kmix that works like the KDE 3.5 version and that worked great.
The next thing that happened was when I added the Twinkle icon to the desktop folder, which I think is lame, it was there but unusable. I couldn't click, erase, or move it. Not having any more calories to burn trying to fix this after the hours I spent on the microphone, I decided to give Gnome a try.

I have always used KDE. I think it has a more crisp, elegent look to it. But Gnome on OpenSuse 11.1 looks pretty nice. So far I havn't had any major glitches. Beagle caused it to run at a snails pace, so I uninstalled that and it helped a lot. The repositories have me pulling my hair out. Every time they refresh or when I try to download a packet through software management I get "Can not resolve address" after I click retry 2-3 times it finally does it. But then it usually does the same thing for the next packet. I hope it's just due to the traffic on the repository servers being high with this new release.

I'll ride out Gnome for a bit. I still need to get Samba working, Banshee to play files on a Samba share (If it can), and reconfigure my Softphone. If I hit any major snags I'll default back to KDE 3.5.

Rob