Personally, I want an OS that's: Polished Open Source Supported Stable
Suse has historically been polished, and is now getting better in terms of Open Source. There's a lack of organizations and individuals to support it though. Debian is perfect on Open Source, and there's quite a lot of individual talent to support it due to its popularity it ISPs and the like. Debian does tend to attract younger users though, and young people (myself included) tend to form more black/white opinions. There's lots of skilled Debian guys who are terrible at dealing with the non-technical Windows-using customers. Also I find the distribution lacks a certain sense of polish: sure, I could do the thirty different things to make Debian conform to what I think a modern OS should do: find out about and use a different installer with proper LVM support and better automation, find out the name of and install a modern hardware detection system, etc. On the desktop, I could add all those missing menu entries and icons for my various Debian apps and put the menus into some logical order. But I have better things to do. RHEL has good local support in Australia, particularly from companies. You can install something that's relatively recent (releases every 18 months) and long-term supported (5 years+). It installs a good quality set of modern Open Source apps out of the box, and if you want more you can get them. The out of box security is better than most distros, services are both turned off and firewalled by default. The desktop is consistent. In other words, the simple stuff is simple, and that means I've got more time to work on the hard stuff. I'm biased now since I work for Red Hat Asia Pacific, but if you asked me nine months ago before that was the case, I'd have told you the same thing. Mike -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
