I'm trying to settle on which distro to use on my work laptop.

I'm a network admin, and my network is a windows AD, so obviously the AD integration that is offered by SLED is a huge bonus, also I like the virtualization features. I've been using Ubuntu on and off, and very much like its package support and 3d desktop options through compiz.

My issue is, my experience is strictly with debian, which I use on all of our firewalls. My only packaging knowledge is with apt and using Ubuntu was nice because I could use the same syntax and commands on my local PC as on my servers. Switching to SLED would change that, and I hear that there isn't nearly as many available packages for SLED.

Can someone perhaps shed some light and give some experiences using SLED in a windows network environment vs ubuntu? Also I use MS exchange and every time I have tried Evolution (on ubuntu) I noticed that the mail client was extremely slow and would try to update my entire exchange mailbox (30,000+messages) every time I opened it. Which made it more or less unusable. Is that a setting that can be changed or is it normal with a large exchange mailbox?

Thanks for any insight.

SLED should integrate better with a windows environment, however, you seem to be weighing heavily in favor of familiarity or you would have simply tried it out.

AD support in ubuntu... as this is a lynchpin:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-to...ntication.html

Ubuntu+Evolution+Exchange...
http://www.novell.com/documentation/.../features.html
... I haven't seen anything specific about evolution/exchange behavior. There are, of course, a bunch of exchange tools in repos. However, I'd expect the behavior you describe if all e-mails were set for "offline" perhaps... OTOH: I've managed to avoid exchange...