Over on ZDNet, Jason Perlow says that openSUSE 11.0 is the “Mercedes-Benz to Ubuntu’s Volkswagen.”

The first thing you’ll notice about OpenSUSE 11 is the completely renovated installer program. In fact, I’d have to say that next to Mac, this is probably the most beautiful installer program I have ever seen. Beauty isn’t just skin deep, however — a lot of time and work has been invested to make the SUSE installer faster and easier to use. A complete install, with everything, including GNOME, KDE, XFCE and the development and server packages — sans the multilingual documentation selected on my ThinkPad T60, with a 32-bit 1.8Ghz Core Duo and 2GB of RAM took approximately 40 minutes. That ain’t too shabby for a full DVD worth of stuff.

I am also quite impressed with how fast the package repository management works in the RC1 release. In 10.3, the initial repository setup could take up to a half an hour, and would frequently bomb out.  Not with 11.0 — a dozen repos, which include the vast user-contributed PACKMAN in Germany as well as the newly launched OpenSUSE build service, only took a few minutes to set up. The new software update utility is also significantly faster and much more stable. For those of you who prefer a command line, the “zypper” utility will provide a similar experience to “yum” or “apt-get” on Fedora/Red Hat and Ubuntu/Debian, respectively.

The review is very positive, but I do disagree with Perlow’s assessment that  “at this point in the distro’s evolution, it is not the Linux for the masses or even for the people. It remains true to its roots, which was and still is for power users with systems that can fully take advantage of everything it has to offer.”

Yes, openSUSE 11.0 will still be good for power users and that openSUSE 11.0 is true to its roots — but I think 11.0 will be one of the very best distros for those new to Linux as well. Not necessarily those new to computers but I think Windows defectors will have a relatively easy time of it using openSUSE 11.0.

I’m going to be inflicting 11.0 rc 1 proving that theory over the next few days with my friends and family. What better test subjects than the ones you love?