SuSE or Debian?

Hi, I'm considering a new distro either SuSe or Debian, has anyone tried either or both? Can you give me a run down of pros and cons. I am a PHP GTK+ Python programmer, I run a few servers apache SQL, I am a student and need a good desktop enviroment, and I love to learn and tinker around. Thanks A Lot!

You really can't go wrong with either distribution. SuSe is a commercial distribution that costs a little too much for my wallet, but has some great desktop packages. SuSe tends to keep up with the latest kernel and package releases compared with Debian.

Debian is a non-commercial distribution that does not require a cash outlay, plus Debians package manager/installer is probably one of the best. Debian developers are slow to release updates because they take their time to verify the stability of their products. Most Linux distros are very stable, but Debian ranks somewhere towards the top.

I personally don't use either, I tend to run Slackware for my server applications, it comes down to personal preference.

Whatever you choose, I highly recommend downloading the latest source code for Apache, PHP, and whatever SQL server you plan to run. Precompiled programs (binaries) don't run nearly as well as if you compile them on your machine.

True, and not necessarily because of processor optimizations, but simply because you can chop out all the stuff you don't need to make leaner binaries. I dropped a few meg off the apache httpd binary when I compiled it myself versus using the RPM version.