I have been using openSUSE 12.3 since the past three months on my new Toshiba rig. Despite some issues, I found it to be the most stable Operating System around. The KDE Release is specially slick, and didnt give me many issues. After updating the system, and installing a truckload of softwares, some issues crept up, that I initially found it hard to deal with. As my wireless driver was a very recent Realtek one, the driver was not part of the kernel that openSUSE initially came with. I was using a patched version of the compat-wireless package, but it was slightly buggy, and I was facing frequent disconnections, when the signal strength was comparitively weak.
Another minor issue was that of codecs. Kaffiene stopped playing video files for some reason, even though I had proper codecs installed. This was more of a graphics driver issue than a codec issue though. My most sever problem was that of the i915 Graphics driver not being loaded. This was not immediately clear to me, as I didnt have much experience debugging kernel issues. Going through the ACPI log, and using hwinfo and modprobe nailed down the problem. It was a module compilation error.
I never expected the problems to be simple. I just updated the kernel to 3.10, using the Kernel of the Day for openSUSE. Now, I am running the 3.10 kernel. All my issues went away in a jiffy, and I back to using the distro I love and admire.
Kernel of the Day – http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Kernel_of_the_day
