Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I read through the openSUSE wireless networking forum for clues as to why NetworkManager wouldn’t connect to my wireless network. There wasn’t anything related to my problem. I could connect, but only using nm-applet. The KDE NetworkManager clients all failed. It seemed like they would forget any security settings I gave them.
Knowing that upgrades are error-prone (why do I still hope they’ll work?), I loaded a fresh install of openSUSE 11.1 on the third Pinto partition. Now knetworkmanager works fine. But I’ve got a new decision. Do I move in to the new openSUSE or see if the latest Fedora will play nice with my ThinkPad T60?
openSUSE 11.1 is much quicker than 10.2 and I like how KDE 4 looks with it. However, I’ve never warmed up to openSUSE’s application launcher menu. I haven’t figured out how to navigate it with just the keyboard and things are rarely where I tend to look for them. And 11.1 does this funky think with the Intel 945GM graphics card that causes garbage to appear on the screen during X11 start and graphical log in. It’s only momentary and causes no harm, but it doesn’t look nice. Lastly, all the other computers in the house (other than the OLPC XO’s) are running Fedora and that would make administration easier. The issue with Fedora? The last release I used didn’t hibernate properly. Since IBM distributed openSUSE with ThinkPads, that was the reason I tried it. It worked and I’ve been running it since.