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.