Most popular distro in Europe - heavily business oriented, with good plain user support too. Large development team provides momentum. Bought by Novell 2003. YaST hardware detection excellent.
Recommendation for newbies: *****
Reference to setting up an slmodem on SuSE here NEC Versa C160 Modem
Some SuSE packages are not "officially" updated, but can often be found in the projects folder on their ftp server 
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/
For example at the time of writing the lastest version of Mozilla Firefox in the official SuSE 9.1 update tree is version 0.9.3. But you can find and install version 1.0 here ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/mozilla/firefox/1.0/9.1-i386/MozillaFirefox-1.0-0.1.i586.rpm
Right click on the RPM file, choose "actions" and in the sub-menu choose "Install with Yast". You will then be asked for the root password, as only root is allowed to install packages.
http://www.suse.com