My opinion ( this morning, right now )
 

If you some day could find a dist that has Slackware / Debians simplicity and SuSE / Mandrakes hardware detection ! Why isnt there anything in between ? Either you have supergraphic and no controll .. or a simple and it takes 3 weeks to get your sound working .. i think this sucks .. big time !

ahh.. felt good to scream this out...

Note: written this morning after trying 5 distros 500 failed installs on a pissy machine, hungry, headace etc.

SuSE/Mandrake can be configured to do everything you wish to do. It requires some work (not really much), but it possible. Good luck!

I have installed all of these distros within the last week, except for Debian.
Yes, but in order to do so, you need to know their proprietary tools (YaST, DiskDrake, etc.). If not, their auto scripts will overwrite any manual changes you make to certain configuration files.
I spent about a week trying to get SuSE to recognize the rest of my network, which I got Slack to do in about 2 minutes. Also spent the same amount of time getting Drake to recognize my soundcard.
Heck, maybe the moral for me is to give Debian a shot?

Pardon me?

At the risk of being accused of post-count padding, pardon me?

The last time I installed Mandrake 8.2, I had sound configured about 1 minute after the main install was done, not 1 week. The sndconfig utility is terrific.

Sorry: which part is confusing? Yes, sndconfig detects and initializes my sound card, but when I start X, every time, without fail, I get an error about the sound card not being able to start. Drake seems to be the only distro in which this happens consistently (and believe me, I've installed and tested several over the past few weeks). Yes, this is likely due to an improper module or configuration bug, but this is something I've been able to hammer out in other distros, not Mandrake.
And yes, Mandrake's "wizards" and SuSE's YaST have proprietary tools, being which if they are not used for configuration (for instance: networking), and it's done manually by editing files by hand, changes will be lost on reboot.

Changes won't be lost at a reboot, believe me. They may be lost only when you have kudzu (or something similar) running at boot.

I've learned to turn kudzu off.

Nothing that I have had configured via the "proprietary" tools in Mandrake has ever disappeared, excepy by my own clumsiness and fat, aged fingers. Even so, I've had some strange things happen in Mandrake, on occasion, as it is not a perfect product.

No distro does everything that everyone wants all the time out of the box, except when an individual user, or admin, makes it that way.

It's the interaction of the distro product and the user/admin that makes a distro useful and useable.

OK, I'm not looking to flame or be flamed here, and I hope you understand my intent to post is just to respond in hopes that I can clear something up. I am not perfect, and I don't know precisely what I'm doing when it comes to admistering a Linux machine--if I did, I'd have answered many more questions than I've asked in this forum. I help out when I can, but I'm ususally the one asking the questions here, and I do hope this board's members will continue to help me learn. But I do know that when I edit a file "by hand" (using vi), and I save and quit the file (:wq or :wq!, whichever you prefer), in MOST Linux distributions, my changes aren't overwritten by some automatic process. Unforunately, this is absolutely the case with certain distributions. For example, I have learned the hard way that Xandros checks and re-writes the lilo.conf file each and every time it boots. After doing several changes to the file, and seeing them change before my eyes after rebooting, I was convinced that the Underpants Gnomes were haunting my PC (and now I know who put the GNOME in Linux), until I finally received a response frm Xandros support about a proprietary executable in its OS.
Another specific example: while trying to configure my eth card to "see" my network in SuSE, I tried YaST and entered all the data for my network, and even though all the info was there, I couldn't even ping the other machines. So I decided to hand-edit certain files (like /etc/hosts, which I actually printed out the second time to prove to myself that I wasn't completely insane, albeit a little), and that seemed to work. But when I rebooted and checked again, my network was unreachable again, and in particular I noticed that my /etc/hosts had been wiped completely clean, save the default "loopback" entry.
Please don't ask me to recreate these errors; I have wiped SuSE out in favor of Slackware, which I like much better personally, and I don't plan to install SuSE again anytime soon.

You shoudn't judge things in the morning.At least not before you had at least one beer - of course I am not a geek.