Personally I have been always biased towards debian based linuxes and with good reasons.
Firstly one of the first distributions I tried was Suse 9.1 and it was a nightmare experience, lots of dependency hell too.
I have tried Mandriva when it was mandrake too, it barely worked.
But then came Mepis Linux my first successful linux experience and from that point on I stuck with debian based systems thanks to the sheer amount of packages and repositories.
I tried various RPM based distros but always found them lacking, either the package management was bad or the support was null.
This is the first time in three years that I sat down and installed a RPM based distro and this is the first time it actually feels like it might work.
Part of the reason why I like debian is apt, its vastly superior to other backends (though zypper is giving it a run for its money in 12.2) and I never had too many issues with it.