Installation of Linux Mint went fine, in fact the only problem was that Suse refused to burn the ISO, so I had to boot into windows for a brief period.

There were no hassles installing the 3D drivers, which was a good start, and getting the network running was a breeze (in fact, the same method in Ubuntu, Suse and Mint, just that there was an alternative in Suse that confused me initially). Everything looks good so far!

I found an issue with Slime + Emacs, but I'm almost certain that this is to do with using the latest CVS version of Slime.

However, I have to say that this experiment has shown me that OpenSuse 11.1 is not as good as Ubuntu - for me. No 3D, very slow package downloading, and default applications not working are the main reasons.

On the plus side, the default theme is a little nicer, yast is pretty good and it's not actually bad. It's just not as easy to get up and running. I like to use the system, not play around with it forever. It also lacks a 'why?' answer, as in why the hell should I change?

But I'm not going to stop here, oh no. Next up is to try another big distro - Linux Mint. Once again, same as before, 3D must work, codecs must work. Downloading right now.

One of the things that Suse seems to lack is the offer to help when you are missing something. When you don't have a codec, Ubuntu offers to go away and find it; if you need hardware 3d turned on, it'll try and grab the drivers for you. Suse definitely misses out on this trick.

Next up, and it's a big one: *NO 3D*. Ouch! There's nothing to grab from the repo's, and apparently ATI don't seem to know my gfx card exists on their website (well, kind of; they'll sell me one but don't list it in their drivers section!). Bummer 'cos this worked out of the box on Ubuntu.

Finally, download speeds when grabbing software are all over the place. They can be really slow, slow or just not fast. Today I got 3.3KB/s for a 80MB download.

I am now officially missing Ubuntu. No 3D, smaller and much slower repos, default software that has failed to work out of the box and nothing to show for the extra pain....

Have to say that Monsoon, the default torrent is not good at all. It crashed a few times and was very slow at downloading. I really don't know why. I was grabbing a torrent at about 60k/s. I tried with transmission and got 400k/s!

So that's both the default music player (Banshee) and the default Torrent client failing to work on my system. Not a great start for a newcomer!

So far, so good.... got all the codecs down I need. No xmms in the repositories, but thats true for Ubuntu as well. But everything seems to 'just work' pretty much. A program called Monsoon is used for torrents, but I think Transmission is a touch better (primarily because it looks less cluttered).

At this point, I'm happy, but there's nothing extra that would make want to switch, no real selling point I could give to Ubuntu users. Then again, there are no turn-offs either. The next few days will reveal more. I suppose the only issue I have is the slow download speed when adding software, and there is less software in the repo's. On the plus side, I added some new repo's and all the codec stuff by clicking on a link via the web - nothing earth shattering but a nice touch anyhow.

Next step is to get 3d working, install xmms and then setup Slime, Lisp and Emacs.

Now I'm hitting the 'annoyances' part. Nothing major, I just have to work out what I have to do to get things just right.

The biggest annoyance right now is updating over the Internet. I'm getting 40k/s, which when the first update is a whopping 300 MB is a tad annoying. And that's just security updates and a few recommended packages. Haven't even started adding software I want yet!

Whilst waiting, I fires up the external hard-drive and tried to play some music. The standard player is Banshee, which promptly hung up on me. No problem, I just switched to using Totem instead, but not a great start. Sound works fine but seems a little quiet.

I don't like the 'start' button either. It defaults to showing you 8 applications. There's a 'more applications' button so you can see the rest but this opens in a seperate window! Very annoying. Luckily it was pretty easy to revert to something that I'm more used to.

Well, one installer later, and I'm posting from Suse. Installation was *mainly* OK. When formatting the partitions, Yast mounted them and then complained that they were mounted :-( . So needed to play around a bit. To be fair, I didn't just use auto since I had 2 windows partitions and was wanting to use the old ext3 partitions I had (just format / and /home).

Network setup was pretty easy, although I cursed for a few minutes because of a simple typo I made (for the technically minded: I need an mtu of 1452 because of my wierd Chinese pppoe connection; I set this up on eth0 instead of ppp0 which killed my connection).

Now I'm going to have a look around the desktop.