Switching Distros from SuSE 9.1

Hello,

I've been having problems with SuSE 9.1 on and off since I installed it. I can't access my samba network and it keeps giving me errors related to my FAT32 partition after I write to it (since I have to format the FAT32 partition in order to get rid of these errors, I am assuming SuSE is screwing up the parition in some strange way). After looking around on Google groups, it seems my problems aren't unique and there aren't really any solutions to them.

So, I am looking to switch to a new distribution. The question is, what is good? I need a distribution that has good support when it comes to RPMs. I hate installing things from source only because it feels so unnatural, and I like the easy uninstall using a simple RPM manager.

The distros that I've been looking into are Mandrake 10.1 and the latest Yoper. I was going to give Gentoo a try, but I don't think I really feel like going through the install right now.

I would like to know what other people think about these distributions or if there is another that would be good as a desktop linux distribution. The only really "server-ish" feature I need is Samba.

Thanks. :P

Hi there,
I have suse 9.1 also, but I didn't have problems with samba infact I had it working with NTFS and fat partitions. It worked ok for me, but what really ticked me off is that 9.1 didn't come with a compiler.
That alone made me switch to Slackware 10. Right away I noticed that it ran way faster (noticeably) than any other distro I had ever tried. I had to work it a little on my laptop but on my desktop it runs flawlessly with no extra work.
Slackware doesn't use RPMS but they have there own installpkg that I think works better anyway. I really was much happier once I moved from SUSe to Slack.

Hope this helps,
Mike