I've gotten quite a few surprisingly good reviews for The Banjo Players Must Die, and I just got my first really bad one. Reproduced here:

Over the last 48 hours, I've learnd rpms, the SUSE Build Service, and excessive coffee consumption. The result? My very own community openSUSE Linux repo. Find the openSUSE 10.2 repo here, and the openSUSE 10.3 repo here.

My first two packages? Why, none other than:

SugarCRM Open Source Edition (openSUSE 10.2 and 10.3, i586 and x86_64)

Live-F1 (openSUSE 10.2 and 10.3, i586 and x86_64)

The roadmap has this on it:

• snort
• tripwire
• yzis
• various essential vim plugins (possibly amounting to a vim-ide package)

Ja, og så var der også projektet med at skrive en command line program til ord oversættelse, som henter og cacher fra ordbogen på archive.org... Hm.

I think "early impressions" is going to go on for a couple of weeks, so I'll keep on updating this entry.

The good

• The installer is very slick
• Very fresh software; only distro so far that finds and serves up the built-in bluetooth in my Asus W6A
• I actually like the new start menu in KDE; very very usable
• 1-click install Just Works(tm)
• First time I've seen yzis duck its head up in a release-grade distro! Yay!
  

I decided that openSUSE makes the most sense for my Linux use profile last Monday. Extremely fresh packages, an intelligent community, a very complete featureset, and (this is where I would get flamed if anyone read this blog) a supporting company which is willing to explore interoperability frontiers.

Without getting into the issue of the Microsoft deal (yet!), I do find it interesting to see boundaries explored thus. The open source community can be quite orthodox about matters philosophical (and that isn't always a bad thing, just as making a ruckus can be a good thing too).