Wishing for Some German Engineering

After giving a try to OpenSuse 11 alpha 3 today, which its EULA calls (optimistically?) a BETA, it hurts me to say that I am disappointed.

Some minor cosmetic issues aside (fonts that do not align properly on my laptop screen) I could not install the darn thing.

The graphical installer kept saying that there are 0 packages selected for install, which will take just about 0% of my drive space. Really? No kidding.

And some lists and menus displaying in stylish white on white enhanced my experience (read: confusion).

It is however a big improvement over Ubuntu 8.04's beta, since Suse at least boots up on my laptop. The main reasons I would love to have a working OpenSuse installation are:

• currently, the lappy runs Mandriva 2007.0 and I love French engineering like a dead escargot in my coffee;
  
• Suse 11 is supposed to come with Gnome 2.22 and I want to check out the API improvements in gtksourceviewmm 2 (since the gnome 2.0 version left out important features such as markers);
• Suse 11 promises GCC 4.3, which has exciting features such as variadic C++ templates;
• I love the Green Graphics!
  

But I guess bullets two and three are also feasible with Hardy Heron (although GCC 4.3 is not the default compiler, and you have to invoke gcc-snapshot to get to it).

But then again, Ubuntu hates my DV6000z laptop. Or vice versa.