Suse 9.1 is the best distro I have tried out so far (the others being Debian and Mandrake). Here is where the backing of a company like Novell comes through. No evidence of the annoying little nuisances that I faced with Mandrake (mind you, these annoyances in no way made Mandrake unusable). The only gripe I have is that the 9.1 Personal edition does not come bundled with developer tools (no gcc, xemacs, etc.). You have to go to the Suse mirrors for them.

Update: Turns out Suse already had a fine tradition of reliability and engineering excellence prior to being bought by Novell.