very desktop-centric review..

i'm a long-term, largely happy openSUSE user that has nonetheless directed enough curses at them not to qualify as a "fanboy". particularly their kde4 integration has given me no end of grief (or maybe it's kde4 itself).
but i think you are giving them heat for "cosmetic" issues - i can see how you come to dislike what you describe, but hey, oS is also a kick-ass server distro, with excellent xen integration, and many other goodies. sure, there is not much news in "infrastructure behind the scenes is a good as ever", but your review seems a tad too desktop-centric to give them justice. to me, it's amazing how little oS sucks when used in such diverse settings as desktop workstation, low-latency audio machine, headless router, xen hypervisor, mail, web, stream and j2ee server, ..., you name it.

as to your criticism of release numbering, well, i share that. i remember times where a .0 would bring basically a wallpaper color change, and .1 upgraded major kernel release and libc :) looks like their release numbers are dictated by marketing...