Why openSUSE

From Zanecorpwiki

openSUSE won Ars Technica's award for distro of the year along with Foresight. I've been a fan of SUSE for awhile, and overall think it has the right blend of user-centric and server/enterprise stuff for my needs. They use the most advanced, well integrated, and well supported KDE interface of any distro and their virtualization tools (through Xen) are really nice. Yast is a great system manager, and their package list is large and easy to deal with.

SUSE has always done a good job of keeping up and while it's not a bleeding edge distribution, it is by no means stagnant. The latest cuts have the latest software and Novell/the openSUSE foundation do an excellent job of keeping the homegrown tools moving forward as well. The combination of the openSUSE foundation (with elected board and all that Jazz) and support from the commercial Novell side of things is--as far as I'm concerned--the best team out there in terms of having mixed and broad support. Last I checked, this was also the mosts popular distro in Eurpope.

Interface

I like KDE better than Gnome and openSUSE is emthe/em reference distro for KDE reviews because it has the best KDE integration. It used to be (in the 9.X series and earlier) that KDE was preferred and Gnome was an option. However, since 10.X, both KDE and Gnome equal options in the install (you could even run both if you like) and openSUSE is generally regarded as having excellent support for both.[1] For all the other reasons I like openSUSE, I'd recommend it to people that prefer Gnome, though if Gnome is all you care about, there are probably better distros out there.

Networking

You get default server/multiuser safe control through yast, but there's also a nice tool for user controlled networking. Yast's firewall configuration stuff is decent, and sufficient for most. If you need more, it's good 'ol iptables under the hood so there are plenty of tools you can use and it's not hard to integrate your own changes alongside yast's basic configurations.