One thing which I do miss from Debian is how unintrusive the package management is. Neither apt-* nor aptitude really make you feel like the system is under any significant load, which should be par for the course.
Now zypper on the other hand is the package management equivalent of Rupert Murdoch; must have it all and must have it now. At certain stages of even a simple operation like zypper lu, this box (which is a 1.8 Ghz 512 Mb lappie) slows down to a grinding halt waiting for Mr. Zypper to let system resources out of his clutches.
I've graphed the system load average stats for a simple routing zypper lu here; the result is pretty dramatic and speaks for itself.
Memory utilization is also a thing to behold. The following chart shows the evolution in the figure reported by free -o for swap space utilization over the course of zypper lu:
