I agree with all of your responses: nothing is perfect, and there are certainly some operating systems that are better than others.

As an example, I've seen in the past that some Slackware packages are not updated frequently; although the expectation may be that this is the responsibility of the end user.

RedHat is a bit expensive, so that's out of the door. I once purchased the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop, but found that it was missing many critical libraries and had to upgrade to RedHat Enterprise Edition, which was a considerable jump for myself.

As for FreeBSD, I recently configured geli with an encrypted root partition, and found that it was unavoidable to enable visible passphrase (which drove me ****ing crazy) with one of my computers due to some unknown reason that I still have not had the time to discover.

I guess I'll give OpenSUSE a try. I haven't heard too many bad things about this OS.