Introduction: I have been a Linux user since 1996 and I have used numerous distros starting with Slackware way back in 96'. Back then I was in high school and had plenty of time to just tinker around. Now a days I just try to cut down to the meat of what I want to do (which is not tinkering around for days on end trying to get basic function) and have a system that is for the most part self configuring and managing. Meat: I installed SuSE 9.3 multiple times on my test box. I did some reviewing of my failed installs and I found if I didn't patch the system it would come up though the few things I did try were broken. As soon as I patched things got much worse. The first round the window manager (KDE) got all screwed up. (I thought SuSE was supposed to be you select a window manager and it always comes up afterward, not root around and try to figure out how they broke it every time a new patch comes down the pike.) Then a little later when I re-installed and patched it got screwed up to the point where it wouldn't even load the kernel into memory. (So much for SuSE's automatic grub reconfiguration or whatever went wrong.) Summary: This is just way too many problems that SuSE 9.2 didn't have and it makes me a little uneasy that there are multiple globably non user friendly problems in their patches. Also there seems to be a pattern going from more broken initial release, then progressively more badly broken patches afterwards. Whatever happened to regression testing or at least testing a patch to see if it works?