just upgraded one of my PCs to 11.2. i think i started out this PC with opensuse 10.3 and have continuously upgraded ever since. 10.3 ran great on it..i ran into what seemed to be performance issues when i first upgraded to 11.x.

and by that i mean a sluggish desktop environment, gnome in particular. all of a sudden with 11.x, gnome didn’t seem very responsive at all. in defense of 11.x…this isn’t exactly a new computer…
model name    : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping    : 6
cpu MHz        : 996.702
cache size    : 256 KB

BUT…gnome was running great in the prior release so it was puzzling. it was still running fairly crappy even after i minimized the amount of daemons and other startup apps running. so then i started using xfce and lxde on this particular computer. of course i would have much rather used gnome….

and now the good news! 11.2 seems to have restored the prior performance with gnome that i was getting in 10.3.  this pc could really almost not even boot X since it’s mostly used for file storage. occasionally though, i use it to scan pictures and documents (as in it is hooked to a scanner).

if mandriva ever disappeared or it became complete garbage i would most definitely choose opensuse to be my desktop distro. it has always been a very close #2. i used sled10 for about 6 months as my main desktop at work and it was a great experience. in fact, sled10 is the most polished desktop linux distro i’ve ever laid my eyes on. i haven’t got around to trying sled11 yet…

my third choice distro? can’t say that i’m sure. probably fedora..?