OSNews: Review of SuSE 8.1 Professional

“SuSE loads in fully graphical mode, and this is nice. It has
the right blend of ‘user friendly’ loading screens and professional
look. Getting to the KDM, you are able to select from various DEs.
The main DE for SuSE is KDE 3.0.3. SuSE comes with several window
managers, but KDE is the main and recommended one. There is some
minor tweaking on the Kicker (there is a very beautiful gradient
image for it), Browse buttons for ‘Work’ and ‘Documents’ and a
tweaked KMenu. SuSE is using the Keramik Qt theme and the
Connectiva Crystal icon theme. SuSE has introduced its own window
manager theme which looks spiffy, but it has two problems. The
buttons are really narrow and you literally have to carefully
target’ them with your mouse and the fact that there are no handles
(‘grab bars’) in the resizing parts of the windows (always nice to
have a visual representation for the resizing handles). Based on
this two points, I like Red Hat’s Bluecurve window manager theme
much better. On the good side, I simply LOVE the two background
images SuSE includes in the distro. One is the main blueish one,
and the other one is a greenish one. Both extremely beautiful.

“Analyzing a bit more the UI, I found that the ‘work’ browse
button on KDE does not make much sense the way it works overall. I
am not sure what exactly it is. I don’t understand what kind of
‘work’ menu would have there card games. I think that this menu is
like a ‘Quick Launch’ for the things you mostly do at an office.
But I found no easy way via context menu or drag n drop to edit
this menu, making it look a bit limiting and maybe amateurish (you
have to click on SuSE Menu/Preferences/Tools/Menu Editor to edit
that menu. A menu showing on the Menu Editor along with 5 more
menus, making it kind of confusing which one is which)…”

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