help me get started in OpenSUSE with some basic questions

[fohat.digs]

Here we go. I do this painful thing about once every 2-3 years over the winter break.

Re-format and re-install everything, upgrading some hardware but not all. Or, as my old-school buddy calls it: "Nuke and Pave"

I am going to stay with Windows 7 64-bit Professional, and set up dual-boot with OpenSUSE 13.2 in the KDE flavor. Please don't go off on some other setup, I have given this considerable thought and made my decisions. My gear would have been outstanding a few years ago but is merely humdrum today. I have an ASRock  970  Extreme 3 R2.0 motherboard, quad-core AMD processor, 8GB RAM, and multiple hard drives including a 120GB SSD that I want all my programs to reside on, while my data files will be on a large high-end WD hard drive and 2 other hard drives. Most of this hardware is existing but a couple of the pieces are new.

Windows has been my primary OS since 1998 (before that it was DOS 2.0-5.0) and I have dabbled with Ubuntu since 2010 (Gnome until a couple of years ago, Unity since). My laptop will remain with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 14.04 for the foreseeable future, but I am going to move to OpenSUSE and KDE because I have gotten a little disenchanted with Ubuntu on a philosophical level, and SUSE seems to be a better and cleaner choice.

So, I have backed up all my critical files, and the old small SSD will be replaced with a larger SSD for my OS. The large primary hard drive will also be new. I plan to install Windows 7 on the new SSD and set "My Documents" and other stuff to the large hard drive D:\

Then I plan to shrink about 100GB from the back end of the hard drive for my Linux partitions and install it there. I am happy to accept the system looking to the hard drive first for the Grub file (or whatever the new flavor happens to be).

My real trepidation comes from the new formats that have come into vogue. I am comfortable with NTFS and ext4 but it appears that now we have UEFI and XFS. I am a conservative semi-power-user but I am far more concerned with compatibility (and backwards compatibility) than I am with cutting edge speed and performance.

Is there any compelling reason to go beyond NTFS and ext4, here and now?
This will all be happening again in a couple of years and if that will be a better time, I will wait.

Next, I have used Grub for several years and I am happy with it. Is there a compelling reason to look to something else?

Thanks for your help! Harry

[IvanIvanovich]

If you're going to have 'spare' the old small ssd I would put the suse instal on there. Install each OS separate without any other disks connected, with their own native bootloader. Then set an entry in grub to chainload the Windows bootloader. I've always preferred to keep separate, that way if one of the os installs, or one of disk goes down you can still boot something.
If you have uefi board, you might as well use ahci if you're not already and set disks to gpt type. There is really no reason not to. While it wouldn't be bootable on older bios based systems, it still mountable and readable on older machines if need arises.
As far as Windows file system, if you're sticking with 7 there is no need to concern yourself about anything but ntfs on the Windows side since 7 doesn't support the newer ReFS. XFS... hardly new since it's been around for 20 years. It just hasn't been a popular choice until rhel started pushing it more recently. I think it should be safe to use if you like.

[fohat.digs]

So I did the format and it is mostly going OK, with the usual stupid glitches, such as Control Panel sees my scanner but the software can't find it.

The biggest hardware  problem is that my Model F keyboard with Soarer's Converter is not being discovered soon enough to work in Grub.

OpenSUSE is perplexing me in numerous ways, some of which may actually be KDE-related.

partially solved, still not optimal First, how do I resize the items on my desktop? Everything is so tiny and my tired old eyes are having a lot of trouble reading it. I got to "Configure Desktop" and do the "Appearance"-like things but none of my changes stick. Is there anything that functions like "view" in Windows so that I can just double or triple the size of all my desktop items?

I need to make the Grub Optimizer work, because the settings are very wrong for me. I have attempted to install it several times, and either it has not worked, or I don't know where to find it. And what is it, anyway - a utility? Is it under Desktop, or Applications? I can't even find the damn thing! It was near the top of the list in Ubuntu.

Maybe I need to go back to Ubuntu/Unity, but I want to make this work because I think it will be better in the long term.
(Even though - gasp - I was getting used to Unity and warming up to it.)

Can anybody steer me out of these conundrums? Thanks!