Hi,
The more important question to me is: Is there a distribution that gives me an (as far as possible) identical working environment on my Laptop (PPC), some desktop machines I use (x86 and PPC) and (soon) on a server (x86). And (as hobby-evangelist :-) that I can advise other people to use, even if they are newbies - at least as long as I can be contacted for help. So, therefore, the answer seems to be clearly Debian - or has anyone any better suggestions? Among other reasons, there will never be problems like in this case with SuSE: stopping the development because there are not enough users.
I had the same concerns to some extent. The only issue with Debian is that unless you want to play with the "unstable" series you end up way behind the 8-ball waiting for them to update to newer releases of key software. I do know that many people do use Debian "unstable" on a day to day basis successfully but I would not want to ask newbies to do that. That really only leaves YDL given your criteria above since it is basically RedHat so you should be able to run *almost* the exact same things on an your x86 box (but you are right there will be slight differences that may trip newbies and others up). I do think YDL does a better job with pure Mac support than most others but probably NOT so good on CHrP and other IBM ppc version workstation support (can anyone attest to that?). The key is that is that YDL/Black Lab/Terrasoft is a ppc shop and would be out of business if they did not keep supporting ppc given their hardware and service business. Any chance volunteers from SuSE-ppc and Mandrakeppc-cooker might get toether and do a European based ppc Linux distribution? Or are these distribution too disjoint (I have never tried Mandrake so I don't know anything about it). Kevin