Well, last night’s triple-boot experiment went a lot better than I thought it would.

Despite some initial hassles when installing SuSE (the installer got confused by my multiple optical drives), it installed easily.

Its certainly a slick-looking OS. The last time I tried to install SuSE (probably 7 or so years ago), it didn’t like the NVidia card I was using and refused to do anything. So this was a big improvement. The boot loader is very swish and the setup menus clear (Ubuntu’s partition manager I thought was clearer when setting up partitions though).

So, some initial thoughts:

I’m using KDE (to get the maximum difference between SuSE and Ubuntu) and I still prefer Gnome. But OpenSuSE did give me the choice in what I wanted as my default desktop. I liked that.

My sound worked straight off (despite showing as muted in the taskbar), so that’s a plus over my last few Ubuntu installs.

However, OpenSuSE by default didn’t mount my windows partition (or my other Linux partition), unlike Ubuntu. A minor thing to fix, but still another tick in Ubuntu’s direction.

The bootloader coped perfectly with the triple-boot setup though. It correctly included Windows and identified Ubuntu as options. Although the Ubuntu entry infact just takes you to Ubuntu’s Grub menu. Something I’ll tweak to include a top-level option for booting Ubuntu.

So far, I like it. Yast seems easy to use, and my network and internet connection was sorted in no time.

The lack of things like a LiveCD mode, or mounting other partitions automatically means that I’d probably still say that Ubuntu should be the distro of choice for newcomers, but so far I like this a lot.

Well, the spoilers are all over the web now for Countdown #24 and it seems the Countdown itself has now finally kicked into gear. I’m due to nab the issue tonight, but Prime’s rampage through Earth-15 sounds fairly brutal, and also gives me pause for thought.

Earth-15 was one of the (many) interesting new Earths that we’d met via Countdown. The idea of a utopian Earth out there was an interesting one, that would’ve made for more interesting stories.

The fact that its now gone, with the heavy implication that more of the 52 (51 now I guess) are going to bite it by Superman Prime’s hands makes me think more and more that the multiverse as it currently stands, isn’t going to be around by the time Final Crisis wraps up. Of course, that doesn’t mean that some kind of multiverse won’t be around. It would seem strange to reintroduce the idea to the DCU just to revert back to the single universe again, and the “52″ multiverse as we’re seeing in Countdown is an interesting place.

Again though, I think the fact we’ve not seen much of the new Earth-2 will be key to this. It was specifically hinted to be different to the other revived Earths during Infinite Crisis, and it currently is the only Earth we’ve seen that directly ties into events from the main DCU (the missing Kryptonians).

Of course, this also means that in my eyes, Superman Prime is now completely irredeemable. He’s now gone from “messed up kid”, to planet-slaughtering adult. While the chances of him being redeemed were slim before, I reckon the only way out for him now is the noble self-sacrifice route (or imprisoned again until the next Crisis).

It’ll definitely be interesting to see where this all takes us. Its good to see Countdown’s finished its meandering and kicking off. I think I’m definitely starting to get excited for Final Crisis.

This was the view from my office last night. Really nice dramatic sky.