I switched to OpenSuSE tonight.
PCLinuxOS had been grating on me for the last few months, since they decided to drop most of their man pages in favor of entering “man foo” into Google. But after an ordinary update, tonight I discovered that the new kernel hung on boot. To my distress, GRUB didn’t list any previous kernels when I intercepted its autoboot. After trying and failing to get grub to show me any files on the filesystem so I could select another kernel from /boot to boot from (why is this so hard?), I booted from a rescue disk… and discovered that there was only one kernel version in /boot, PCLinuxOS had been deleting the previous versions. This bad practice dismayed me, it’s standard for distributions to keep the previous one or two kernels around, in case of a case like this, where a kernel that doesn’t boot on someone’s hardware get pushed.
I’d been meaning to try out SuSE again for a while, and this pushed me over. I backed up my disk and did a clean install.
We’ll see how the new distribution goes.