I have some relatively fond memories of SuSE, because it was my first GNU/Linux distribution. Back then, it had the advantage of being pretty newbie-friendly (graphical installer / system control utility) and good ISDN support. Since ISDN apparently never became popular outside of Germany, not many distros had good support for it, and setting it up manually could be a real pain (at least for a newbie - a couple of years later, I set up a dial-on-demand ISDN router using NetBSD). So SuSE was, in retrospect a good choice for a first distro.

Eventually, though, I got fed up with YaST, because it used to overwrite config files and thus wipe out all manual changes one made to them. Does SuSE still do that? I remember reading about plans to rewrite YaST from scratch, so hopefully they found a better way of dealing with config files. From a UI perspective, YaST was a neat tool for non-techies.