Which?

[Deja Q]

Poll question: Which?

Used to be SuSE.

Went to Fedora. Fedora is a bit more picky and needs manual intallation for Java and MP3 capabilities (though new laws will ensure it's the same problem for SuSE, I'd expect), but is otherwise had for a far better price.

[RoyGBiv]

1. MP3s, etc. ...

Yes, SuSE requires some significant tweaking to get MP3s, et al to work seamlessly, but as you suggest, this is true of all newer distros for copyright reasons. The commercial version of SuSE is more prepared than its OSS counterpart, such as having Java included, but you still need to install several packages from other sources so that it'll do things like play windoze media files and create audio discs from MP3s. Using a packman repository and knowing which packages to get, however, makes the process fairly simple.

Fedora 4 was the first distro I tried, and I abandoned it because it didn't like my USB ports. I've since discovered the reason for this and could work around it, but I've already established SuSE as my main OS and am happy with it, so I'm sticking with that for now. I've got another hard drive on which I plan to install and test other distros when I get time.