Its one of the reasons I fell in love with CollegeLinux, its slackware with some added guis for setup. But when it all turns to custard all the slackware files are right there, and its VI all the way home. As for the multimedia, its just something I do a lot of, so playing video and audio as well as DVD's are issues for me. Another CL benefit for me. But I am doing a series of installs and reviews on a number of distros right now, and at the end of each install I will do a boot up as a stopwatch timed run, as well as how long it takes to open a large open office spreadsheet from the desktop, and see if I can detect any speed difference in the distros. I plan to use this as a sort of easy to compare distro list to help new users get a distro hat will make a good home distro. so It will need these things considered. I'm sure I'll upset some, but if the reviews are honest and with no barrow to push, and the test results can be easily duplicated, then the benefits to everyone could be obvious. Naturally I'll be testing based on the sort of install a standard user would type ino the setup, and from what I understand Yast would come out well in such a test. but we will see.
I have never really considered the multimedia support. We use it for other reasons. SuSE has a lot of configuration stuff with a gui interface (yast) that overlays the usual Unix adminstration scripts, thus making the installation and much of the basic administration easy via the windowing interface. For a non-savvy unix person it is great, but to be frankly honest, for real work and server administration it is just a pain in the arse. We still wonder whether we should have gone with a more primitive distribution that doesn't have so much obstructive guff superimposed over the standard unix configuration scripts.
Michael.
-- "Engineering is the art of modelling materials we do not wholey understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyse so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance." Dr A R Dykes - 2003