One of the ten distros on the "Keef Linux learning box" was SuSe. The icon was, as I recall, a green blob. It was a bit slower than Fedora on the tests I did. It couldn't recognise/handle the SCSI card with the CDRW, the DVD drive, and the scanner and wouldn't network with the other machines (yes, I know how to set up Samba - I think it was the particular network card that it didn't like).
I'm all for a Linux thread - the only worry is that there's a lot of Linux "out there" and it could grow exponentially. Mind you, if it's a "no flaming" thread - unlike some of the Linux forums I inhabited - that would be a plus. It seemed on one or two of them that anyone who had a problem he couldn't fix wasn't safe to be out alone. Some, of course, were excellent.
I've got copious notes down in the Essex house of all the distros I loaded, what worked and what didn't, and what it took to get stuff to accle. About four shorthand notebooks full, in fact.
In comparison: the Win 7 notebook is about ten pages - for two machines - and most of that is the list of software to reinstall and stuff to copy back after wiping and reinstalling from Beta to RC1.
The Linuxes that worked best for me were Fedora (very stable and capable) and Mandriva (very close second). I used Fedora in preference to the others, and had v7 v8 and v9 installed on separate partitions, to compare them.
Debian was good but crashed more often; Slackware was very impressive but the most inscrutable of the bunch by a long way - true geek stuff. Ubuntu/Kubuntu wouldn't let me do stuff - very much the "nanny" distro. SuSe wouldn't see several of the peripherals. Mepis was OK but no SCSI. Knoppix (on a CD/DVD) saved my and friends' bacon on Windows machines several times, and I always carry a copy in the laptop bag. The others were "Yeah, fine, but.."
Since only I used the machine, I didn't particularly want to have to keep going through all the "SU" stuff to be able to do anything on it. I got thoroughly exasperated having to type the SU password several times per minute on some distros while doing stuff to the config. Surely, I reasoned, it can remember that it's me and I'm SU. Some could, some couldn't.
Then, when the video card died and was replaced, only Fedora 8 still worked. All the others crashed out with long X-messages. I don't know what was different about the setup in Fedora 8, but that's the one I've kept for writing the Cisco device and for backups from the Windows machines.