FC 8 In and on its way out

The FC8 KDE Live distro had problems. For one, unlike Opensuse it did not offer a resolution at the time of booting. Therefore FC8 booted with the resolution that it was comfortable with - 800 X 600.
The interface seemed sluggish, almost like CentOS. Which leads me to conclude that Centos may not be the one to blame, since it is probably based on FC. But, unlike Centos just after the desktop loaded I got a message that the File protocol had died. So the medium may be to blame as well.
Thanks to a full blown control panel, I could reset the monitor's supported resolution to the correct level - 1280 X 1024. Restarted X with the Ctrl - Alt- Backspace combo, which is quite useful, and was presented with a desktop with the right side cut off. Moving the mouse to that edge scrolled the rest of the desktop. On checking the existing resolution, I found that X was running at 1440 X 900. Why? Needed to reset and restart X to get things right.
A major drawback - no Openoffice. All office applications had a K prefix, infact for anyone with a K allergy is sure to catch one, its everywhere!. Kwrite seemed to have all the required tools, but I'll need to spend a bit with it before I finalise. Seems to save files natively in ODT, which stands for Oasis Document Format, probably intercompatible with the other common odt.
Another lapse - No Firefox!!!!!!!!!!! So, now I'll have to install Firefox, as well as Opera to regain productivity. Konqueror is workable, but try saving a password and it will launch another application to track system wide passwords. Not user friendly at all. And Blogger looks different in Konq than in Firefox
A few of the touches reminded me of Knoppix which is based on FC. The well stocked menus were quite reminiscent.

Inspite of the first apprehensions, installed FC8. Took almost twice the time the rest did. The medium is definitely to blame. No errors during the install though.
The root user must have a 6 letter password. A user need not.
Since Opensuse was already installed, I saved the bootloader on the boot drive not MBR. Decided to configure the bootloader from within Opensuse to include FC8.
After installation, and reboot, found that Opensuse had already included FC8 in its boot menu! That was quite surprising. Selecting the entry, loaded FC8 without any glitches. But when the FC8 menu loaded the glitches began.
There is no button to login, I think every other distro has such a button. So a user has to enter the password and press Enter. But what is the user has no password. Still an enter is needed. Double clicking on the user name did no good.
There are other Window managers on offer Metacity was one. But trying to load it for the session proved unsuccessful, had to restart X after gazing at a blank black screen for a few minutes. KDE loaded fine.
Overall, FC8 doesn't bring anything new that Opensuse hasn't, and takes away a lot more. So FC8 may be on its way out.