OpenSUSE 11.3 - just how do you configure this animal?

In my last post I complained about issues in the latest OpenSUSE 11.3 release which annoy and frustrate me, especially as I believe they could be easily avoided. I've persevered with the distribution for a couple more days, hoping I could get to like it, but I'm rapidly loosing faith. Mainly due to the very confusing settings system SUSE employs.

One common but astonishing discovery is that the SUSE integrators appear to have included two of many of the main configuration panels. Granted, the duplication is between Gnome or KDE's built-in tools, and SUSE's proprietary YaST system, but as a user I've just got very confused. How am I supposed to know which tool to use? And who knows what happens if you switch from one to the other, creating duplicated settings for the same devices. Why have they left this choice to the poor, hapless user, instead of doing the sensible thing and removing the Gnome or KDE default where a better alternative exists in YaST?

Not convinced? Well, I'll stop moaning and will let the following screen-shots from a default Gnome installation do the talking. Who says you don't get value for money with Open Source software - two for the price of none anybody?

1a. Keyboard settings - Gnome:

1b. Keyboard settings - YaST:

2a. Mouse settings - Gnome:

2b. Mouse settings - YaST:

3a. Network settings - Gnome:

3b. Network settings - YaST:

4a. Printing settings - Gnome:

4b. Printing settings - YaST:

5a. Software updates - Gnome:

5b. Software updates - YaST:

I'll be keeping Fedora 13 on my netbook thanks, even if it does only have half the configuration options that SUSE offers. Sometimes less really is more.

Thanks for reading,
Nick