Back in the days when I formatted my desktop every week, I tried a lot of linux distros, including SUSE. 6 or so years forward and I haven’t touched any of them. My choice is Ubuntu for both the server and desktop. Mainly for being widespread (and therefore lot of troubleshooting resources, and .deb’s for almost everything out there).
Last week I got back to SUSE because Novell launched SUSE Studio, an online service for building your own configuration. You select the OS you want (OpenSUSE, SUSE Enterprise 10 and 11), the software packages and even your own files. You then download it as a standard ISO, USB image, VMware or XEN virtual machines. You even got the bonus of booting it in their servers, and use a Flash VPS client to try it.
This is an awesome idea that I believe Canonical and even RedHat will mimic sometime soon. This allows businesses and organizations to make their own distros based on a mainstream one, but with the software packages they depend on.
I am personally interested in being able to build custom small and light virtual machines for each of my project, with only the dependencies needed. We are only waiting for Level 1 Virtualization to be mass-deployed.
Another of my interests in the project it to select the software stack for my servers and download the VMWare/Xen image for local testing or for deploying in my VPS host. Actually I believe that such service providers like Amazon, Slicehost, Linode and others should provide a system like this one, but with more OS choices and we could rent it on the fly. I know there are a few companies that have automated setups that can do almost as SUSE Studio, but the VPS on-the-fly would rock.
Novell is really impressing me with this project, and the on-going work with Mono.