Suse 9.3

9.3 takes ages to install. One reason could be that since it comes in a DVD, there are plenty of packages that get included if you choose whole package groups like development, office applications, games, etc. There are so many packages that the 5 GB partition I installed it in is more than 90% full already (Update: Mea culpa. More than 1 GB of this was taken up by the interim files from the 2.6.11.11 kernel compile).

Having come out unscathed from FreeBSD's disk partitioner, I thought I would find 9.3's partitioning a breeze. Not so. There are still enough mines to be wary of, if you want to preserve existing partitions (after a lot of hits and misses, I figured out that unless you make sure that the mount point is set to blank for existing partitions, they too would get formatted).

Since I am pretty up-to-date in terms of packages in 9.1, I didn't find 9.3 to be that much of a radical improvement. 9.3 doesn't have the perceptible slowness that I have experienced (and, in fact, continue to experience) in 9.1, though.

Parting tip: If you find Firefox's default menu and toolbar font sizes to be too small (happened with 9.3 for me), you can adjust them by updating the userChrome.css file.