I have used early Slackware versions, SuSE 5.2 to 6.0 and Dabbled in Caldera... I like Debian the best. The amount of packages handily defeats even SuSE. Installation ease has to go to SuSE, though once you are familiar with the way of doing things, Debian wins out.

Debian 2.1 is now over a year old, and in Linux terms that's ancient. They have a little bit of a political way of doing things which undeniably slows them down, though one has to admit that thousands of packages is a heavy weight to carry.

It would be a mistake to assume Debian is not up-to-date. You load an old version off CD-ROM, but Debian has a phenomenal Internet upgrade procedure. You edit a list of sources for .deb files (quite plentiful) and run a program called apt-get. Packages and applications update *in place*. I am at this very moment upgrading my 2.1 ("Slink") system to a 2.2 ("Potato") system over a 56k dial-up line (yes, it takes a while, but can be interrupted and pick up where it left off).

I write this comment for those judging distributions. If you have *some* Linux experience (enough to be comfortable with the Bash shell and use man) you owe it to yourself to try. I'll never go back to my second favorite, SuSE. And I haven't even voted yet (gimme a minute)