As a change from my recent posts about music and photography I have finally decided to sit down and get together my thoughts about using OpenSUSE 11 on my ThinkPad T40.

A couple of points to note:

The first is that prior to OpenSUSE 11, I was still using Ubuntu 7.10 (and I would have preferred to stay on 7.04 to some respect) with the Gnome desktop environment. I had upgraded OpenOffice.org to 2.3, and Firefox 3.0 by the end. However I skipped 8.04 with the noises about the beta version of Firefox (which was a bizarre inclusion on a Long Term Support release) and PulseAudio (whatever it really is) being somewhat unstable. With 8.10 out soon, I will reveal whether I will be moving to that by the end of this review.

When you consider that the average Linux distribution comes with all of this software included by standard, and when your laptop like mine is a little long in the tooth for Windows Vista, Linux can for those people not tied down excessively to platform specific software could quite easily get by with Linux on their computers.

The main two preclusions to this have historically been patchy hardware support and poor usability. OpenSUSE 11 is a breath of fresh air as it is simple to use and though it’s an old laptop, the hardware support has so far been impeccable.

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