Novell bought SuSe a month or two ago. Anyway, give Linux a try, I use it at work for webservers and a content management system. I'm no expert, but I have a decent understanding. Programs like Apache and Bind were designed for Linux so they run much better on a linux box. Also, all of our firewalls are based on a linux kernel from
http://www.Smoothwall.org here at work.
I use RedHat here, also tried Mandrake once. RedHat is no longer going to support the v7.3-9.0. Now they are selling RedHat Advanced Server and Enterprise Server with companies like Dell and IBM. In other words, they won't come out with a desktop version 10. Instead they have the Fedora project, which will pick up where 9.0 left off. It will still be free/cheap, but the server versions are up there in price.
Anyhow, but a Linux book and dig in, thats what I did. I've installed it on 3 boxes here that are in production use, so its not that hard to pick up.
calmdown: