I had been thinking seriously about buying SUSE Linux Professional for 
some time.  My Mom is running SUSE 8.2 on her Wal-Mart.com box, and I 
was thinking it would be easier to support her if I was using the same 
distro lineage.   With Novell buying SUSE I think SUSE Linux will be 
launched into being a significant player in the business IT world.  I 
think the main thing that Novell adds to the equation is a worldwide 
support network.  Trying to be objective here, I see the Linux world 
dividing into two camps, Red Hat and SUSE.  There will always be other 
great distros, but the corporate world is going to like going with one 
of the leaders.  Also, did you see in one of the stories that Novell has 
over $800 million in cash.  They are not going away anytime soon, and 
they can afford to bring serious capital to the open source table.

So, to get to my point, I just purchased SUSE Linux 9 Professional from 
Amazon.com for $64.99.  I'm going to work toward switching from Mandrake 
to SUSE, as I think that SUSE will be more widely used.  I could be 
wrong.  I have been wrong before.  Anybody want to buy a boxed copy of 
OS/2 Warp V4, cheap?  ;-)

My $.02,
Jim Herrmann