I've recently moved to centos5/sl5 based distros for my desktop and have been criticised by some students for picking such a backwards distro. But debian often lacks tier 1 hardware vendor support, especially for weird new tech that comes out developed by small groups. (e.g. lustre and gpfs. Anyhow Debian 5.0 is out, see http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214. I'd like to move back to Debian for server/cluster installs that we have in work, but not before GPFS or lustre, or whatever fancy networking hardware has generic support in the distro in question. I might just install it into a virtual machine to see what Debian 5.0 is like these days.