SUSE Is Viable Again

I loved SuSE back in the days between versions 6-9. At the time Novell took over around 9.0, things quickly went downhill. Everything I liked about SuSE was badly damaged or taken away. A few releases were okay, but the whole model of development was bad corporate. There is no “good corporate” but at least Red Hat is tolerable; Novell was not.
It took some time for the developers of SUSE to shake off the worst effects of bad corporate herding, but the current release of 12.3 is just about usable. It still takes some tweaking, and you will have to get used to things being a little different, but I believe it’s worth the trouble.
The two primary usability issues are still the KDE desktop and font rendering. KDE will never be what it once was, but it’s finally getting tolerable. (Look out! That can only mean they are preparing to screw it up again.) I won’t waste a bunch of time rewriting the two best guides for fixing things.
MTE (Make Tech Easier) has a very good guide on taming KDE 4 and making it act more like KDE 3. Just change one detail: your new desktop theme “Vintage” goes in /home/[username]/.kde4/share/apps/desktoptheme — the .kde folder in your HOME has changed to .kde4.
Part of the damage from passing through Novell was the destruction of font rendering. I highly recommend you follow the guide at OpenSUSE Starter and add the muzlocker repo to get things back like they once were. Just change the details to match the 12.3 release.
I’m still entirely disappointed by the failure of the Plasmoid widgets to match the glory of the Kicker stuff in KDE 3. I want more system information at hand, and I want it all in one place. So I use GKrellM and I built the gkrell-weather plugin from source. Simply add the gkrellm-devel package, accept whatever dependencies come with it, then get the plugin source here. You can build with the defaults and let it install where it likes, because when you restart GKrellM after installing the plugin, it will be found. You can find the appropriate weather station codes here. For example, the closest to me geographically is Tinker Air Force Base, KTIK (you have to use all caps).
Naturally I had to add WINE so I could run Notepad++ because nothing in Linux works so well, and also so I could run Word 97. I still use Opera for mail, in part because KMail is an overly complicated boondoggle and you are lucky if you can get it to work. It tried to import settings from Opera, but failed to create any kind of usable configuration and I can’t work out the obscure non-standard options in KMail while the automated settings keep interfering. YMMV.
Still, I’d say if you really need a current Linux distro for a newish machine like mine, it’s pretty good for desktop use.