I like suse 9.2 myself, but I install for free over ftp, and then grab all of the development libraries so its easy to recompile from source when I need to. The other distro I like is demudi, but suse 9.2 comes with the 2.6 kernel, so my usb stuff works better than with the 2.4 kernel, and I don't have to recompile my kernel to have decent latency performance.
