I have used SuSE 9.0, then SuSE 9.3 and now SuSE 10.1. I have to say that I am really impressed with SuSE 10.1 so far. Three real long term problems with SuSE have been overcome with this release - may have occured earlier of course (SuSE 10.0), but this is the first time I am seeing them. They are:

1/ Slow Boot - SuSE 10.1 boots about 50% faster on the same hardware as SuSE 9.3. I have both of them loaded on this machine, and SuSE 10.1 boots WAY faster.

2/ General sluggishness - SuSE has always been great in terms of what was provided and the degree of integration everything had, but it has never been FAST. Gentoo is FAST. Arch is FAST. SuSE has always been a bit on the slow side. Not so with 10.1. I note a really pronounced increase in overall speed. Again on the same hardware as my SuSE 9.3 install, 10.1 is noticeably snappier.

3/ Fonts - SuSE, like most of linux, has long suffered from poor font rendering, resulting in the "ugly font" problem that has been talked about so much in these forums. SuSE 10.1 is like a breath of fresh air! The fonts are crisp and clean and beautiful. I am not sure what is responsible for this (haven't dug into it yet) but it is wonderful.

Good job Novell!!!! A worthy successor to a long line of great linux releases.

Did you do a fresh install?
My big issue with SuSE has always been the fact that ~1 out of 4 upgrades failes.

I did do a fresh install. In fact, since 2004, when I first got into Linux, I must have installed various versions of SuSE (9.0, 9.3 and now 10.1) a dozen times or more on a large variety of computers and hardware. I have had only one failed install out of that whole set, and that was because I was unlucky enough to have a keyboard fail on me in the middle of the install. Unable to type any more, and with no extra keyboards around, I had to abort the install until the next day. At that point, I got out and got a new keyboard and was able to complete the install successfully.

So, my experience has been somewhat different than yours. My experience has been that pretty much uniformly, SuSE installs work very well.

Others in this forum - your experiences?

I said that upgrades are a problem, not fresh installs.
Fresh installs even work perfectly well with MS Windows... but if you tried to upgrade from SuSE 9.1 to 10.0 for example, chances are that the system is screwed afterwards.

I've only ever tried upgraded once and it failed spectacularly, though I was warned beforehand that it would probably break from 10.0 to 10.1 because of the changes to yast so I can't complain.
I've done fresh installs of 10.1 3 times and each time I've had no end of niggling little problems and one big one, I have to uninstall sax and delete all traces of it from the comp to be able to set up my display properly.
Once it is running though it's been fantastic, I didn't think 10.0 could be bettered but it was in every way, and it's sooo fast on my ageing computer.
I'm getting a new comp in a couple of weeks so I'll be doing another clean install and I'm hoping that the initial post install teething problems will go away this time.

My apologies, I did miss your point. Yes, I have NEVER upgraded. I have heard far too many horror stories, both from Linux and from other OS'. I make it a policy to never upgrade. I always do a fresh install and just restore a backup of my personal data.

Well, if personal data (/home) would be the only thing I want to preserve, I would probably do fresh installs myself. But I use linux on servers, too, and there's a little more I want to keep than just data. Like my custom Kernel and my configuration files, plus the applications that I have installed or removed after the installation. That probably would still be ok, I'd just copy /etc and the Kernel image, too, but the company prefers to have those servers running. :-) And - after the fresh install - I'd still have to take care of the apps present on my system.
Debian seems to be a good choice. Upgrading from woody to sarge worked without any problems at all.