I like h264enc and xvidenc - the interactive shell script rippers

I thought YAST is much more than a package manager indeed! Even according to wikipedia: "Yet another Setup Tool[1] (YaST), is an RPM-based operating system setup and configuration tool that is featured in the openSUSE Linux distribution, as well as Novell's derived commercial distributions. It features tools that can configure many aspects of the system." So it's more like a combined interface for different system administration tools, including the package manager. I think you can install and use both "yum" and "apt-get" on Suse like any other Linux distro. But of course I agree with you that yast used to be excruciatingly slow while doing the package management job. It updates all repository everytime you open it, which is absolutely not necessary! But I hear from my friends that things have changed in latest versions and they are quite happy. For me, I am currently using Ubuntu and Fedora.