OpenSUSE 10.3 — First Impressions

I installed OpenSUSE 10.3 the other day and these are my first impressions.

Installation went smoothly — a few packages had to be manually added as usual. Emacs, for example, was not part of the default install whereas Freeciv was. I would like someone to explain that some day.

I am pretty happy with it so far, but of course I have notice something that could deserve improvements.

Package manager
I find the new gui with installed and available in different columns quite unintuitive. The old layout with one list and a install/uninstall/etc marker used much less screen real estate and left meaningful space for package description. Unrelatedly, it starts with gtk assertions:

(y2controlcenter-gnome:4204): libgnomevfs-CRITICAL **: gnome_vfs_get_uri_from_local_path: assertion `g_path_is_absolute (local_full_path)' failed
(y2controlcenter-gnome:4204): libgnomevfs-CRITICAL **: gnome_vfs_monitor_add: assertion `text_uri != NULL' failed
...

which probably is not a good idea.

f-spot
The new version is nice, but when I first installed it, it would not start. Investigation showed that its dependency, sqlite2, was not installed, whereas sqlite3 was. I suspect a packaging problem.
Network manager
Where to start? Hmm… It still crashes left and right. I hope I don’t have to see anything about connection to network “(null)” anymore. Why does it have to wake up every second and do nothing?
Login screen
The tab key used to work to switch from login to password. Now it just selects the login name. I am not sure what that change was meant to improve.
Beagle
Utterly unsuited for a machine like this. Why does Novell push this cpu/battery vacuum cleaner so hard?