The OpenSuSE 10.2 distribution I installed on an older Compaq 1.6GHz desktop a couple of weeks ago is pretty impressive. I had installed SuSE 9.2 Professional on it previously, but Novell has stopped providing automatic updates for that version. The upgrade managed to keep all of my settings and installed applications intact (upgrading them to current versions where appropriate).

I had a problem with the original 9.2 installation due to the fact that EzBIOS had been installed on the system's hard drive to patch the drive parameter table, and that caused all kinds of strange things to happen. There was also a glitch with GRUB (the boot loader) on the 10.2 update that a reinstall of just the GRUB package fixed.

Otherwise, the installation process wasn't significantly different from that of Win2K or XP, with the added bonus that SuSE automatically fetches the latest updates as part of the installation.

And it actually ran acceptably with only 256MB. I've since upgraded to 1GB on that box, and the difference in performance is dramatic, but I wouldn't have called it unusable for web browsing or basic desktop productivity tasks w/OpenOffice before the upgrade.

A couple of things about OpenSuSE are a bit annoying, though:

• Multimedia support is severely crippled. You need to download an alternate xine engine to enable playback for MPEG, DVD and any of the Win32-specific codecs.
  
• 3D Acceleration support for nVidia isn't provided in the distribution, and you need to have the kernel sources installed to compile a kernel-specific module. Not terribly hard for the moderate-to-advanced user, but your average J6P would probably blow a couple of neurons trying to figure it out.
  
• smbfs is now cifs, so if you're upgrading from an earlier version, there's a bit of tweaking required for any scripts you might have used that mount shares on Windows or Samba hosts.