One of the things I'm most concerned about in all of this is the quality of the "consumer" version going forward. 9 has really disappointed me. (And, from the topics on this list, perhaps many others.) 8 also did, which is why I skipped it too. I was really, really happy with 7.3. It was completely solid for me (once NVidia got their driver lined out). I still want to be there, but I don't want to run so far behind. If I wanted to run year behind, I could be running Debian. Which is germaine, because if SuSE doesn't feel solid, it's going to be a toss-up between 7.3 and Woody stable, and I don't know as I can get over needing to change again in 8 months. Sure Woody stable is old stuff, but "stable" sure *ought* to be by now. Yeesh.
Overall, I thought 8 was better than 7.3, and 9 better than 8 (so far) due to things like better Postfix integration, CUPS being the default print system, font-config, etc. I switched to Red Hat at 8 after running SuSE for several years up thru SuSE 8.0.
The main reason I switched was availability of patches. YaST2 starting to have serious problems applying updates starting with 8.0 and it was worse with 8.1 (haven't tried 8.2). Part of this is because I am in the US and SuSE moved all their official FTP servers back to Europe. Their patch servers are overloaded and updates fail often. The other part is that the quality of YaST2 has been on a downward spiral for about a year. In 8.1, there were 5 or so patches for YaST2 before the box set was released, and you had to apply those before it would download any other patches.
When you get down to it, 95%+ of the code in every distro is the same. What is different are the supplied admin tools, the quality and availability of the patches, and third party support. The community pounces on security issues right away, and both Red Hat and SuSE quickly package those updates. My problem was I could not reliably get the SuSE updates for my servers (and workstations). Sometimes I had to manually download critical patches to apply them. I still do this for 3 SuSE production servers I maintain.
I've tried all major distros recently, and many smaller ones, and I have yet to find a better overall package than Red Hat. Two years ago I preferred SuSE and maybe two years from now, the planets may have realinged and something else will be better, but for now, all my new installs are Red Hat (server or workstation).
Best Regards, Keith -- LPIC-2, MCSE, N+ Droplets of yes and no in an ocean of maybe Got spam? Get spastic http://spastic.sourceforge.net
