Which one?
 

So, I have been using Ubuntu couple times before, but being obsessed over photoshop I have always found myself installing windows again. Anyways, I think I will once again install a Linux distro, and after some comparing, I am thinking about openSUSE or Fedora. Quite simply, I would like some advice and opinions.

The computer I will install it on is rather old with 526MB or something RAM, 2.5 Ghz processor and ATI Radeon...9600 or something (really don't remember specs right now and I'm far from home, sorry). So something fast and lightweight would be great.

What I need my computer for is browsing internet, some image editing and drawing/painting and watching videos. So you could recommend something too, but mostly I'm interested in differences between SUSE and Fedora.

Also, there is two bonus questions. Would Mint run well with the specs mentioned above?
And almost completely unrelated question: I got iPod Classic 120gb (don't remember the "gen" but its very new model) and I would like to know if there is some neat trustworthy software to transfer music into it. I tried songbird on windows and it wiped more than half of the stuff in my iPod and sharepod messed the cover art of all my albums so I'm a bit paranoid about using 3rd party software, even knowing the songbird has gotten better iPod support since that time.

Sorry about the length of this post, hopefully I get some answers. Maybe I should just try both SUSE and Fedora out myself, but in the meantime, I could use some opinions.

I prefer openSUSE for you.

for video , you need to add some libraries. I followed this procedure to play all type of multimedia formats videos playing on openSUSE
for photoshop, use GIMP - download page of gimp

Okay, why suse? Any...reasons? Or just your opinion?

yeah ! Because of some reasons & personal experience I preferred openSuSE.

Installation
when you install openSuSE, it has option of "automatic configuration". SuSE automatically checks your hard disk space, allocates some memory by partitioning the existing drives. Automatically detects existing linux file systems, "asks us to replace existing linux or create another linux partitions. This allows us to easily partitioning, easily installation of openSuSE.

where as fedora, it will stop at partitioning. unless until you had some experience that stage can't be proceeded. You may need experts advice, or you may need to spend some extra time to understand. I am not saying difficult, but i am saying not as easy as openSuSE.

Boot process
In openSuSE, you can edit bootloader and get good penguin theme. etc. openSuSE has good looks.
where as fedora, bootloader displays a black and white screen like a command mode display to select list of operating systems in your computer.
Themes
The first thing you see when you turn on your machine is the default theme shipped with your distributions desktop environment. openSUSE is more eye catching. I also believe the openSUSE Menu’s are much better.
System Management
For those new to openSUSE you can find almost everything within one convenient location called YaST. YaST is short for Yet another Simple Tool and it is just that, a simple easy way to change your configuration for almost everything with your system. Here is a quick snippit of what YaST looks likes, and the possible options you have.

another advantage with openSUSE is you can login as root with GUI mode. fedora,ubuntu restricted to login as root in GUI mode.

Can you choose which GUI (KDE, Gnome, XFCE...) you want to use: If your choice is KDE, that would eliminate distros that do a bad job with their version of KDE.

...a memory upgrade would be great, but you should be ok with that, particularly if you concentrate on the lighter-weight GUIs

The reason that I've not been able to move from SuSE to anything else is that I can't find anything else that gives me the choice of GUIs and does a good job with kde. And particularly, I dislike the whole RedHat/Fedora clan after a bad experience back at RH 5, but whether that is relevant to you...

Probably. If you like mint, which given my preferences, it will be unsurprising to know that I don't. I mean, its ok, but I'd prefer Mepis. But, if you are prepared to upgrade the memory, you should be able to run anything at all.

BTW, there probably isn't a noticeable difference between any mainstream distro and any other, running the same gui and set up with the same services, etc. So, there probably isn't much mileage in trying to find the mainstream distro that runs better on this or that low spec machine. If you are worried about this, look at the specialist 'light' distros, but they primarily achieve their aim by running lighter stuff (like lighter GUIs) and ensuring the unnecessary services are not run.

If you want to know what you will like, you will have to answer that question, not me. Your choices seem to be trying out several at once (tried any Live CDs??) or of trying just one and moving on if you don't like it. So, in the end, you will have to try out stuff.

If you want nice looks for your system go for openSuSE.
If you are not interested how it looks, but you want speed booting ... go for fedora.

I wish that selecting a distro were so simple---but it's not.

You simply have to try various distros to see what works for you.

Note that the "nice looks" is a function of the desktop you use (eg KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc.) and then of the way you set up the themes, colors, etc.

And, if you really need Photoshop, it will run on WINE/CrossOver. (But try GIMP, also)

nice looks is a function of desktop environment only. but this KDE works fine in openSuSE.

And KDE works fine in Arch, too. But I don't normally recommend Arch for new users.

The point is that there are many differences between distros---one simply has to try a few and see what works for them.

KDE works fine in any distribution. openSUSE just brands KDE with the lizard, nothing else is different. It's all same in any distribution. Changes depend on upstream development, not on the distributions.

Could Wine/Photoshop really work on my specs at all? I suppose its a little heavy-ish. And I want CS2 or I will just use GIMP.

Speed and light weight is important to me and at least with the Ubuntu the 3D-accelerating etc. didn't quite work out so the eye candy had to be turned off (I didn't try to fix this too much, as it seems that ATI is not very supported graphics card). Also, just a couple of days ago I remembered crunchbang and some review said that it has "2D" prettyness, so it's rather interesting. Does someone have something to say about crunchbang? Is it good enough to be used as main os?

Oh and just as a side note, I do feel comfortable using the terminal etc.

EDIT:
One more thing, I consider minimalistic GUI stylish. So no need for an shiny-apple-metal surfaces and glossy stuff. Mint default looks nice, #! looks excellent, and I liked Ubuntu default look despite the browniness, though I did change it afterall. I have to say OpenSUSE and Fedora looked pretty neutral, but it's not bad.

I understand why you say this, but it is just not true. People do get too hung up on the branding and the default colour theme, but just because other people get hung up on that, you shouldn't think that it is the whole story.

Which distros have given you the choice of the two styles of program start menu, columnar and slab?; which distros have given you the 'alphabetic program start' feature under kde 3.x?; as far as I know, its exactly one, but it certainly isn't every distro that does this.

There is an interesting comparative review here; one thing it doesn't say is 'they are all the same' even if you might say that in some cases the differences aren't that worth arguing about.

There is an intersting preview of the milestone release which will incorporate kde 4.4 here; in particular note:

In addition, one thing that you have to do to be a good KDE4 distro is support the monthly releases, in some way. You can argue (ok, I would) that by this stage, that keeping pace with monthly kde 'point' releases should be irrelevant, because kde4 should be largely settled, with only minor feture changes and bug fixes that don't affect many end users being brought in. Unfortunately, that would be to live in a parallel universe, and the distributions have to make it easy to update kde to the latest and greatest, with all that implies for putting stuff in repositories and organising repositories with the appropriate level of granularity and making the various upgrade paths clear.

Unfortunately, one way of dealing with this, perhaps because it is hard work that maybe should be unnecessary is to ignore the problem and say 'you'll get whatever comes with our next distro release when we release it, and, if there are bug fixes for that, you can get those, but we won't give you an easy path to the next point release of kde, per se'.

I suppose that some day, all of the big mainstream distros will catch up, they'll have to, but not all are at the same stage of development.