I've been using Suse Linux for a few years now. It replaced Caldera OpenLinux as my distro of choice around 2001. (For all you Ubuntu zealots out there, I've also given Kubuntu a try off and on for a few months at a time... :) ) I've found that despite it's off releases, that its a pretty solid OS and provides a good balance of configurability and user-friendliness.

When 11.0 came out, I was pretty excited to see what KDE 4.0 looked like. Within the safe cocoon of a VM, that was made possible. The KDE 4.0 UI was billed as a user-ready release but that it hadn't been polished like KDE 3.x was. I found that was an accurate description. It reminded me of Enlightenment (which I've also been using off and on for months at a time). It looks sweet, but doesn't cut it in terms of functionality.

KDE 4.1 looks good, but is buggy and is still missing a lot of key features. For one, why doesn't Konsole do transparency without compositing anymore?? The task bar lost tons of features - I can't make that transparent anymore either, or provide my own custom image, or really anything except resize it. Also, I was able to get it to allow 2 rows of tasks in KDE 3.5 but now each task tries to take up half of the bar. Lastly the max and min settings don't seem to work the way they should.

In terms of Suse - what happened to the sweet search box within the K-menu? Bring it back!!

Despite my best efforts, I can't get the keyboard shortcuts in Amarok to work right either, or the Repeat Playlist setting...

What bothers me the most, is that Novell/OpenSuse are threatening to remove support for KDE 3.5 in Suse 11.2. Unless KDE 4.x undergoes some serious bug fixing and added features, I'll be stuck with Enlightenment again. There's no way I'd prefer the Windows UI to KDE anything, but others may feel that way.