Old Yaster
I've been using Suse since 7.2, and remain fond of Yast. Probably because I grok how it works.
I ditched 10.2 because it went all politically correct and removed drivers for my wifi and graphics, but tried 11.0 on my netbook. That, too, came without proprietary drivers but it did include scripts for fetching them and my netbook has wired ethernet. If only I hadn't needed 3rd party web sites to tell me what to look for it would have been even more impressive.
I'm happy with the pragmatism of getting into bed with M$, but I did think that it was silly to give them money for no good reason. I'd be up in arms if I were a shareholder.
I agree that Mandriva is probably the best thought out and supported distro, but it works best if you give them money and the 'barrow boy' style of marketting where the minute you paid for something they tried to sell you the same thing, or a better one, and bombarded my mailbox... well it put me right off.
Suse, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora are all fine products. But then, so is Mint, Knoppix, Elive, Sabayon, PClinuxOS, CentOS.... it doesn't seem worth picking between them, and people who have 'views' about Novell have plenty of alternatives to choose from. Unlike Windows, which seems to be sold by only one vendor as far as I can make out.