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What is SLED?
SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) is an desktop operating system made by Novell and based on openSUSE. While openSUSE is free of charge and mostly used by individuals and home-users.
SLED costs and aims at small-medium businesses and at enterprises. It has a release cycle of about 2 years, while openSUSE pushes cutting edge software and innovation every 6-10 months. Usually, the improvements made in openSUSE reach SLED after o while in form of service packs.

Novell's last SLED release was in 2006, named SLED 10 (as it was based on the 10th version of SuSE). It was a very solid linux operating system and reached the desktop of many companies and institutions, being one of the firsts high-scale deployments of a linux operating system as an MS Windows alternative.
Now, Novell is ready to launch SLED 11 (based on the 11th version series of the, now called, openSUSE). While still beta SLED 11 rc4 was made public for preview. Here are the first impressions.
 
Quick look
SLED 11 boots ans installs without a problem. It features a 2.6.27 series kernel with both Gnome and KDE as desktop environments. The desktop is very polished, although the artwork might suffer some changes until the final release.

GNOME version is 2.24, bringing big usability improvements (like tab file browsing with Nautilus), while KDE is shipped with the 4.1.3 version, bringing the new era of KDE experience: KDE4.

Software
SLED 11 offers – in terms of software collection – a complete and out-of-the-box ready to use system.

For the office, we have openoffice.org – complete office suite, Dia – diagram editor, GnuCash – financial manager, Planner – project management and Multysinc – for synchronizing information (calendar, contacts etc.) with mobile devices.
Enterprise-type applications, like Citrix Presentation Server and DICE (Desktop Integrated Collaborative Environment) are also included.

A number of classic proprietary software are also delivered like Acrobat Reader, Flash, Sun Java 1.6.0 u12.

For multimedia, we have Banshee and Totem as media and movie players, F-spot for photo-camera interaction and organizing pictures, GIMP for photo-editing and Inkscape for vector-drawing. Support for playing wmv video-files is offered through the Moonshine player.

Stability and problems
Though not jet finished, SLED 11 is incredible stable. Some things aren't ready out-of-the-box, like the proprietary NVIDIA driver, and automatic installing has some dependency problems. But the manual installation works flawless. Also, the composite extension, needed to be manually activated in order to run the desktop-effects.

The update process and software management are trouble-free; quite an improvement, as SUSE always had problems or bugs here. Small things still escaped, for instance, if you install KDE4 after the update was set up (with GNOME), it'll still ask you to set up the update. Anyway, if you follow, it will detect that the source was set up and won't affect anything.

No problems that can damage working experience or data were found. This doesn't mean that they don't exist (the testing was very brief), but it is almost sure that, at the moment of the release, we'll have a stable and slick desktop operating-system.
 
Conclusion
SLED 11 is a big step forward. Though SLED 10 was ready, this new version takes your desktop experience at another level. Most of it is due to the huge improvements made over the past 2 years on Linux, in general, and in openSUSE, in particular.
With its better performance, hardware support, stability, usability, ease-of-use and high-standards Novell technical support, SLED 11 will surely find its place on many computers.