Let’s start with the bad:
KDE4
Many people used to KDE3 are confusing the show desktop button on KDE4 down at the bottom left with a start terminal button. This then leads to confusion as few know (or understand) what the dashboard is.
The KDE4 Konsole background colours seemingly cannot be made to stick. Going to Settings -> Edit Current Profile… | Appearance and choosing “Black on Light Yellow”, then pressing Apply, followed by OK changes the colours for all open konsoles. If you then close ALL konsole windows and then go start a new konsole again the background will have reverted back to grey on black.

You can no longer rearrange menu items by dragging them as in KDE3’s kickoff menu.

The system tray is very glitchy and often has background/refresh issues.

Upon starting krandrtray and left clicking the icon that appears you are presented with a window that lets you change resolutions etc. However when you choose a different resolution nothing happens. There is no readily noticeable apply/OK buttons either so I have no idea how this window is supposed to work (please note that pressing the right mouse button on the icon pops up a menu that DOES work).

Multimedia keybindings are not set by default (e.g. volume up/down/mute keys do not work). The brightness keys did work though.

Moving panel icons is no longer a middle mouse button drag operation. There is a fairly painful start moving, make sure icon is in the right place and immediately pop up window then go to stop moving operation.

The KDE network applet seems to show a slither of a blue bar on previously used APs that are not in range.

Double clicking on a toolbar now shades windows by default which is a change from KDE3.

Multiple monitors do not seem to be handled well with things like the SUSE menu at the bottom left of the right hand monitor appearing at the right hand side of the left hand monitor when opened.

Trying to copy and paste a file between Dolphin windows does not work.

Dragging a file out of an archive an on to the desktop results in a shortcut to the file in archive rather than copying it to the desktop.

Network manager on PPTP wireless network
For reasons I don’t yet know NetworkManager-pptp is not included in the stock repositories. This proved a deal breaker for people who use their laptops at the University where I work (and they have been waiting some time for this in KDE after seeing it readily available in Ubuntu’s GNOME).

FAM
Using famd with a SLES10 server did not have the expected behaviour with nautilus or dolphin. Doing touch newfile ~/Desktop/ via ssh on the server did not result in a new icon appearing within a nautilus or dolphin window looking at the Desktop folder.

System Hang
The system would completely lockup (not even sysrq would work) periodically forcing hard reboots. Thanks to the Novell bugzilla I was able to learn about this problem (reiserfs and user_xattr) so you already know about this. Thank you for having an open bug tracker – I wish more companies had bug trackers that could be anonymously searched (although I am sad that bugs found by Enterprise customers are often unviewable by me (and this comes from someone who has paid for SLES 10 but that’s a different issue) ).

The good
The installer looks extremely slick and seems to work fairly quickly.

The package manager is extremely fast when it comes to solving dependencies now. I’m not sure but it might be even more robust than previously too. Absolutely outstanding so far.

64 bit machines seem to use tickless kernels now so battery life seems a bit better.

KDE seems to handle the dimming of the backlight properly when coming back from a screen blank.

Suspend to RAM seems more robust.

The widgets have potential.

Firefox 3 is definitely faster than Firefox 2.

The compiz integration is much much smoother than in 10.3.

There’s definitely interesting stuff in this openSUSE but there are some real issues that cause grief. Not a version for new or inexperienced users but there’s promise for future distro releases…