We are a software house and we have been using SuSE for 1 year.
Our experience have been mostly with laptops, openoffice, evolution, firefox and for the devs eclipse and netbeans. Again we are not speaking of a large deployment of standardized desktop but of a few desktops for power users like markting executive, developers, who are pushing every application to the limit.
It has been, all in all, a decent environment. Though there are a few things which could improve (In order of relevance for us):
OpenOffice.org - It came a long way and 2.0 looks good but it has still shortcomings. What I am saying is that OOo is good for almost everything you can think of but if you give it to somebody who does powerpoint for a living (or excels) he will not be able to work as effectively as he had with MS Office. How can OpenOffice improve? By putting it into to the hands of controllers and sales reps and listen to their feedbacks
Laptop support - again I am speaking about power user who will need to be able to connect to a wireless network from an hotel and work on batteries during a taxy ride. It must work. To mention a few hichups here: long startup time, suspend to memory not working, not up to standard wireless tools (kinternet goes in the right direction with SuSE 9.3 but it is not yet there).
Applications - here I am talking about Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash and the likes. Everything beyond Office and internet is still missing. Until this applications are available I cannot put a linux desktop in the hands of a design team or any other specialized workforce.
Desktop organization - I understand that linux is about choice and being a linux users since '95 I appreciate it as well but I saw with my very eyes many people getting lost in a linux menu or trying to work with yast + kde control center + gnome control center. There cannot be 12 mixers in a standard install, if I use KDE I just need the kde mixer. There should not be double administration tools i.e. yast, kde control center. We need some streamlining here.
Interface speed - KDE and Gnome have become slower then anything I saw on desktops. I mean they take about a minute to start up and the interface does not feel as responsive as it should feel. On top of it they tend to take a lot of memory and cpu cycles.
Again I am using linux on a daily basis and I am happy about it. I am only providing some feedback in the hope it might be useful.
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