I've had a few minor issues with SuSE but that's it. Releases 8.0 and 8.1 were actually better for me, in terms of devices working the first time, instead of having to manually configure them. Only problem with SuSE 8.1 is that the support for GNOME is not very good at all; SuSE is definitely aimed squarely at the KDE audience. As long as you don't mind that, SuSE 8.1 is a great choice. Otherwise, Mandrake offers a wide array of desktop and window managers that seem to work well.

Actually, though, I prefer using Debian whenever I'm experimenting with software, and I like the Libranet implementation of Debian GNU/Linux best when I'm in that mode. On the opposite extreme, when I just want a nice desktop environment to use, I stick with Lycoris Desktop/LX.

I think that LM9.0 may be easier to set up than suse. I have LM9.0 and tried installing Suse 8.0. Suse 8.0 doesn't work with my hard drives (attached to Promice Ultra 100), the setup doesn't work with a USB keyboard, and the mouse icon doesn't show up. LM9.0 worked with these and didn't need further setting up for devices. It even installed the drivers for my firewire drive during setup. Suse may be packaged with more applications however.

A couple of years ago now I had a Compaq Presario with a USB keyboard and a Wheel Mouse and Mandrake was one of the distros that I could always count on to work. SuSE usually worked, too, but it seemed that I always had to reconfigure something after installation. SuSE 8.1 seems to be getting the configuration down pretty well, but even though they have a lot of packages, these days they seem to only put attention on configuring KDE applications, so the great number of packages they offer aren't really as valuable as it may seem at first look.