Mandriva still beats any I've tried, including PCLOS. Don't even mention SuSE to me.

I'm just beginning the Gentoo experience. It seems that there are at least 3 manuals which I need to read to install on AMD64. According to two of them, I can do the initial installation from my Mandriva OS. That's new to me at least.

my distro isn't linsted ... i'm a ubuntu (debian) fiend i kinda started on suse though but quit after 9.3 and switched to ubuntu. in the breezy stages

Since SuSE is just one vote shy of first place I'm wondering why you didn't care for it. I have 17 different distributions and find SuSE to be hands down easiest to install and operate. Of course I'm a developer and not a gamer which might be part of my preference.

I think it would be interesting to see how each of the groups are using their systems. I recognize that people feel pretty strongly about their choices.

I havent tried the rest of them yet still... but I'm doing pretty good with PCLinuxOS.

These are my recollections only. I didn't keep notes and I'm sure I've forgotten things. The problems combined to drive me to the easier option. I'm not a developer or a gamer. Just an every day user.

One major sticking point was sound. I could get it to work and then it would stop. After a while I couldn't get it to work at all.

The Adobe Reader interface used an extremely small font. It was supposed to integrate with my Kde settings but it didn't and wouldn't. One final suggestion from this forum did not get tried because by then I was thoroughly sick of logging into SuSE just to try and fix something.

There were several relatively minor irritations which together augured badly for the future.

I'm used to being able to reset time using NTP by right-clicking on the clock. When I tried that I got a very long message which, from memory, was a manual on how to set up NTP. I could not, for the life of me, see why such a normally simple operation had been made so complicated. It's normally part of Gnome and Kde but SuSE has evidently decided to make it into a big deal.

I was using a dial-up service at the time. When I tried to use it, I got a permissions-error message. I checked and, yes, I was in the "dial-up" and "users" groups. Eventually, on a guess, I changed a setting using Midnight Commander and was able to use dial-up. Why the complication, I don't know. And I had to use guesswork to fix it.

I make extensive use of a notebook called kjots. It wasn't installed and Yast couldn't find it. I couldn't find it on the installation DVD but tracked it down on a mirror eventually.

I had problems using rpm. I forget the details. The Yast tools sometimes seemed to be incomplete. I was often not sure whether I had managed to change relevant settings or not. Sometimes, it transpired, I had not; yet, there was no indication of any problem.

In the end, it boiled down to this. I was able to install Mandriva without all the issues in a fraction of the time I spent trying to find solutions to the problems I encountered with SuSE. It seemed to me that SuSE had gone to some trouble to make things more difficult rather than easier.

Interesting.. I'ld honestly say SuSE linux is one of the easier to use distributions. the rpm package manager is the same on SuSE as it is on any other rpm based distro.. so i dont get what the difficulty with that is either. yast was a beautiful tool that always worked for me... weather programmer or not SuSE was just simple to use it was one of the only distros that i came acrros that after install everything just worked without much configuration effort at all. How long did you actualy give suse a try for?

I'm just going to say, that with SuSE, once it's congifured, it works better than any distro I've ever used.
The only reason I've had issues with it is because most of my hardware is newer than my SuSE install. It's that and the fact that there are several legal issues with SuSE because it's distributed to so many places...

Timothy I've been a fan of SuSE back to 8.0 And I found each successive install (not upgrade but install) to be easier than the previous release. I received a copy of SLED 10 with my Linux Format magazine this month. I have never installed anything as easily. The Evaluation expires in a very short time which cuts you off from the automatic updates. So I determined it was time to support my favorite distribution and I purchased the program with one year of support. Surprise, Surprise the release is identical in every way with the Evaluation - nothings added and nothing missing. I have installed it on 5 computers and in all cases it came up running everything. One of those computers was the ACER Farrari 4000 which throws up in the display with literally everything. SLED found it and configured it without my help.

I've installed 18 Linux distributions and absolutely none of them go into place as neatly as SLED 10.

I didn't "give SuSE a try". I didn't resolve all the issues and got sick of trying to fix them. The rpm issues were things like a message that "the package is already installed" and, when I then tried to remove it, "the package cannot be found."

My hardware at the time was new and I was trying to install a 64 bit version. Still, I never want to go back there.