slightly off-topic, sorry, but opensuse might be a good half-way house for people who are interested in rpm systems, but not in the business of managing machine

slightly off-topic, sorry, but opensuse might be a good half-way house for people who are interested in rpm systems, but not in the business of managing machines themselves. it's an rpm-based system (like redhat/centos), but it has more of the user-friendly polish of ubuntu (imho - i use centos, ubuntu and opensuse regularly, but more as a programmer than a sysadmin). in particular, the yast management system is good at "hand-holding" as you dig into lower level details. and there's a new release out in a few days (at which point my ubuntu laptop will be going back to opensuse - it was nice, but no better, and i'd prefer consistency across all my machines).