Ubuntu
So I decided to resize my home disk to make place for one or two experiments with distribution, and my first experiment was with Ubuntu. It's got a very good, if text-based, installer that installs my wifi card without problems. The default Gnome desktop does look slick. No KDE better than 3.2.3, though, so that side of my requirements isn't met. But I decided to explore Gnome at its best a bit... And there are plenty of niggles that make me sure that they have a long way to go.
For instance, with Gnome you can configure system sessions almost the same was as Konqueror profiles, only more complicated. Now session management is something that should and could work without any configuration. Your session is closed, the state gets saved, you log in again, the state is restored. All apps, no exceptions. In fact, an improvement to the KDE way of doing session management would be to make a snapshot of the session state every five minutes or so, so you don't loose your work session even when an application makes X crash.
And Evolution 2.x just looks weird. It tells me it prefers to use an alternative command, starting imapd over ssh on the imap host instead of just connecting to my imap server. In any given column of buttons there will be some that have a different size... Weird, as I said.
But the volume, battery and wifi strength applets look a whole lot better than KDE's equivalents. And deb-based apt-get performs enormously better than rpm-based apt-get. In the end I rebooted back to SuSE because I couldn't yet get a recent enough KDE, but no doubt an alternative repository exists, somewhere.
By the way, a preliminary investigation with Knoppix indicates that this is the first distribution that makes two processors out of my single hyper-threaded processor, so if I can carry that hardware detection over to a hard-disk install, Knoppix is a contender, too. At least with Knoppix, I won't have to work with an out-of-date KDE.