I've build Mplayer, xine, and MythTv from tarball source, including drivers for tha Hauppage tuners and had no particular problem adopting red hat centric directions to SuSE. No more trouble than I would have had adopting them to Ubuntu. I build a lot of stuff from source tar balls, and also install the occasional binary tarball (Vmware etc) with no particular problem.

That's why I was surprised that you said you couldn't do tar-ball installs. I do it fairly frequently.

Well, so do I... that isn't (or wasn't) the point. The point is that Novell costomizing creats an environment which is often only SuSE friendly, and (like all automation eventually) is difficult for newbies to handle when the automation (tweaking I think it was called) fails. Newbies are going to be exasperated to find that Fedora is diff from SuSE is diff from Debian is diff from Ubuntu etc etc etc. The way Linux works under the covers should not change from distro to distro... there should be a standard and no automation scheme (tweaking) should break the standard for prevent manual configuration--- otherwise we end up with a *nix version of Redmond (M$). By the way... once you get something critical (like Yast, YOU) working correctly, don't mess with it. Leave it alone... and for crying out loud... don't change it on a release boundary... the installers and updaters have got to be (next to the kernel) the most stable part of the system. Without a good reliable updater nothing else can be fixed either--- don't don't "tweak" it...