Opensuse

So there I was reading a copy of Linux magazine (i think!!) They were waxing lyrical about opensuse v11.0. I read the article with interest and got sort of carried away. As there was a copy on the dvd with the magazine. I decided to install it.
I followed the instructions and voila opensuse v11.0 with KDE v 4.1 (i think) was installed. I have to say i really liked the look and feel of it. It looked and felt very slick and far more user friendly than hardy heron. I was not convinced about the plasma applet on the desktop ( a premonition of things to come, i suppose).
A few things impressed me:
1 Adobe flash was available through the package manager and bang everything was working well with Firefox.
2 I found it quite easy to connect to my network using the wifi dongle.
So I was at this point further down the Linux road. It was going well.
With a little bit (well actually a lot) of help I managed to connect up to my windows network and printer. This was good and I was pleased. All was going well but I stiil had not manged to sync my phone to the evolution address book and or KDE mail.
Anyway, I carried on using it still not entirely happy.
I tried running Opera as a web browser and still had the same problems with flash. I gave up on Opera again!!.
Some weeks later open office v 3.0 was out and I wanted it. I ran automatic updates hoping it would come through but lo and behold something went wrong and i was left with a blank white screen - the error message related to the plasma applet. Aaargh!!!!
So there I was with another problem. I googled the error message and found a supposed solution to fix the problem. This involved using the terminal and typing in a command. I did this and phew I was back at a visible desktop. However none of the programs worked. I just did not know enough about unix to be able to fix it. I then decided to reinstall. The reinstall did not work. I was stuck with a non working desktop. Once again I had come to a halt on the Linux journey. However, I knew a lot more and had a better understanding of Linux than when I first started out.
By this stage the next version of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) had been released. From what I was reading this seemed to be a huge leap over the previous version. I then decided to reinstall the new version of Ubuntu and see how I got on.
More about that later.