Should I Upgrade to the Latest openSUSE
From Zanecorpwiki
The latest version of [1] is 11.1 and in my opinion it would be worthwhile for just about any user to upgrade.
Package management is much improved over the 10.x line (actually, I think 10.3 wasn't that bad but I didn't have direct experience). The bizarrely long and frequent repository syncing issues are better. Still not great, but much better. With 11.0, you pretty much had to shoe-horn in KDE 4.1 because the default KDE 4.0 really wasn't ready for prime time. The compiz eye candy is in and there are actually some really useful features to be had from the GUI madness.
The biggest win on the application side is Firefox 3.0. I had manually installed it on my 10.2 box 3 months back, so not a huge functional change, but I like the aesthetics of having it in the base system. openOffice 3.0 is also really nice, though I don't use it as often.
My only disappointment is it doesn't use the 2.6.28 kernel. ext4--the latest 'linux native' file system module--has lots of nice improvements, especially when it comes to databases. Databases are something I use a lot.
It's pretty, stable, installation/upgrade is a breeze. There really only one thing that might keep you back: 11.2.
As with all things computer, you need to consider the cycles when upgrading. So, let's look at 11.2. It'll have 2.6.28 kernel, which means ext4 and some other nifty stuff. It'll probably have KDE 4.3 and a new version of openOffice. On the whole, though, you get the major version upgrades with 11.1. Firefox, openOffice, KDE and others all went through major version upgrades. KDE 4.0 kind killed openSUSE 11.0 for me (and in my experience, I never like the first major version SUSE distros). Even better, most of them went through the major version upgrade for 11.0, and so are now stabilized in 11.1.
In short, 11.2 will have some nice new features, but 11.1 makes a big jump in features over the 10.x and adds lots of stability visa-vie 11.0 (especially for KDE users like myself). The other reason to go with 11.1 is because then you're next upgrade can be 11.3, which will (if past patterns hold out) be the final, mature version of the 11.x line. Thinking even farther ahead, 11.3 will be the 11.x to end on, because 12.0 should be next, but you won't want it because there'll be issues that won't be addressed fully till 12.1.
Sense a pattern here?
