Just over half an hour until the world's favourite Time Lord returns to our screens...

Tick tock...

England won 4-0 this afternoon, one step closer to next summer's World Cup finals.

It really is a professional distribution, in fact, I'd go so far as to say it's the finest release I've had the pleasure of using in all my years in the community. Now, sure, I'm biased, I used to work for SuSE and they put out some real quality releases during my time there, but this is simply the best.

I'd been using the betas (I'm on the beta test programme), so I knew it was shaping up well, but let me give you some of the highlights: GNOME 2.10, KDE 3.4, OOo 2.0-pre, Beagle, Firefox.

First thing that is noticable as a change from previous SuSE releases is that in the software selection part of YaST, you have the choice of setting up either a KDE or GNOME based desktop. Naturally, I chose GNOME, and was delighted to find at the end of the install that it had done the "right thing" and also then selected GDM as the display manager - and it had been themed to match the new bootsplash theme. Consistency of look is very important, that extra bit of polish makes a real difference.

Having booted for the first time, I then logged in. GNOME first, here's a shot of the default GNOME setup in 9.3. The theme is Industrial, and in the panel you can see the rocking netapplet, resapplet, SuSEplugger, which handles hot-plugging and new hardware (this may well be replaced in future versions under GNOME by gnome-volume-manager which will shortly be available as a ULB package), SuSEwatcher, which monitors the availability of online updates, as well as launches for Evolution, Firefox and OOo Writer.

Next, I logged into KDE. Note the consistency in the look and feel between the two desktops (and no, I don't know where that black dot came from, I swear it wasn't actually there), and again we have SuSEplugger and SuSEwatcher. All in all a very good pair of primary desktops. All the others you'd expect are also included, Xfce, Window Maker, Openbox, etc, so if you like an alternative desktop experience, or have lower-spec hardware, you're very well catered for. Across all desktops, the same menu structure is maintained, and it's very well thought out, so you'll never get lost or confused there.

Both GNOME and KDE screenshots were taken on a new account to show the default look, here's my own desktop to really show off the capabilities of SuSE 9.3 as a desktop. I'm using the Nuvola theme from GNOME Themes Extras (coming soon as a ULB package), and you can see a Beagle-enabled version of Firefox (details on how to achieve this are in the distribution's release notes), GKrellM, Tomboy Notes, Beagle itself, as well as GNOME's weather and battery applets in my panel, amongst other things.

I still have yet to suspending my notebook to disk, when I last did it (with an early beta), it didn't quite work as expected, so I'm a little nervous about trying again, but I understand it's working great for a lot of people. I've also yet to setup NdisWrapper with the drivers for my WLAN card, although this has always worked fine in the past, and I'm planning on making a script available to do this automatically for other people with an Acer Aspire 1710.

I've not yet done any server work with 9.3, my servers at home are all currently running 9.1, and only get rebooted for kernel updates, don't want to sacrifice the availability that doing an upgrade would entail, but my view is that as a desktop/notebook option, SuSE 9.3 Professional is a grea choice. Pre-Order it now from Novell's website.