I have found the stability of the system does vary with distribution, although theoretically it shouldn't. I suppose much of this is down to proper versioning, eg dynamic libraries.
I haven't used Non-free Suse. Out of the many other distros I have used, I find Debian by far the most reliable, easy to administer in the long term, and difficult to install. (I rarely bother installing Debian from the official ISO, I prefer to clone systems). It took me 6 months of using GNU/Linux before I had enough knowledge to install Debian. Once I did so, dependency hell simply vanished and reliability has been 100%. I vowed to avoid RPMs from then on.
I haven't used BSD5. What licenses is it distributed under?
Magnus Manske wrote:
Not that I don't truse SUSE, but at http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=92486&cid=7951598 someone's very pleased with FreeBSD 5.0: "Our site gets a million hits a day on a completely db-driven website. Both the Apache webserver and the two replicated MySQL servers on the backend are all running FreeBSD 5, and have been for months now." Does this configuration sound vaguely familiar? An alternative to consider in case SUSE proves unstable.