So Emmanuel ?
We wanna to here some feedback 
and experience notes!
Mahmoud M'HIRI Mail: mhiri@ieee.org Phone: Under request
Suse is one distro I haven't used, but heard good things about. Ubuntu is a great option for developing on simply because it's one of the easiest distro's to use for someone that isn't an expert in linux, and doesn't necessarily want to become one. Redhat distro's are too heavy for my taste as far as how much crap they have running on just a base install. And if you don't already have experience with a package manager, apt is one of the easier ones to learn.
Coming from a long time working with bsd, I also love gentoo once it's installed, but the install is too tedious and it doesn't need to be that way. There is no reason why I should have to use fdisk and create my own fstab and all the other basic configs by hand. It's too bad also because the gentoo portage system is great.
Chris
You can use Gentoo script installer and it does all that for you =)
In my case I use Gentoo for coding in Rails, basically my “ide” is vim with a nice .vimrc, a couple of aterms running mongrel and tailing logs and another one in the part of the code I’m working on (models, views, etc). All this under fluxbox. The best experience I’ve have is with that set, anyway RadRails is a nice tool to have too, and of course nopaste emerged for do questions on IRC 
