I got Open SuSE 11.1 in a magazine. I tried it. It sucked. It is broken from the start and has been that way for many versions. I felt compelled to try it. SuSE was one of the first distro’s I ever used and it helped me to get into Linux when I first started. Occasionally I get the urge to try it and see how it works. It has a good reputation and every couple of years I cant help myself and I give it a shot. The sad fact of the matter (besides their evil alliance with MSFT) if that this distro is terrible. As soon as I started the install, I received errors that the repositories could not be authenticated and that if I proceeded that I was doing so at some chance of peril. I continued, then towards the end some package could not be downloaded and the installation failed to finish. Ridiculous. This is the current version and there is just no excuse for that. This basically sums up my experience with SuSE for every version since the early 7s. Additionally. any SuSE user I have encountered personally in the last 5 years has had some technical issues that could not be solved due to the fact that SuSE’s management tools are defective, they have been the type of issues that the Debian based distros just don’t have. So, as far as picking distro’s go the the only thing I recommend besides using a Debian based version is that you dont even bother with SuSE. Its likely that no matter what you try you will eventually end up with Debian anyway. Save yourself the waste of time.