they all suck
I've had the misfortune lately of having to install and work with an assortment of Linux distributions. It has served to prove that just about all the others are crap. I've been using Redhat and Fedora for a few years, and there's an audible minority that like to bash Redhat for this or that. But I can't see why anyone uses many of the alternatives.
I'll start with SuSE (which is also Novell now). The installer is utter crap. Overly complex with a multitude of confusing options. If you go the route of wanting to refine package selection, the conflict resolution is an attrocious array of options. And never, ever use the text based installer. Its Alt-letter hell. The assortment of options are utterly confusing. And I won't even get into how unstable their kernel is. It locks up when using any reasonably modern hardware.
Mandriva (formally Mandrake). It still shows its Redhat roots, but the stupid fricking penguin with the stars in its eyes is so utterly cheesy & lame. I guess that's my only big complaint, but it all looks so cheesy and goofy.
Debian. The installer is so primitive. Sure, they're close to releasing a graphical installer, but seeing how every other major distro in existence has had one for nearly 7 years, its laughable. Yea, apt-get is nice, but i honestly don't see what the big deal is. Its package management for the brain dead. For people who don't want to think about or understand how their OS is put together.
Gentoo isn't half bad, but spending hours putting together a system really doesn't scale for anyone but a hobbiest.
FC4 is going to be out next month. I'm looking forward to it.