There's an option in fstab that I think is relatively new. It lets you mount devices by label. The label it uses corresponds to the label you can give a partition with the e2label command. In KDE the labels also show up in the "My Computer" view in Konqueror.
The reason I mention this is that I think I've hit on a nice way to make your system more flexible. Normally when you install SuSE it defaults to creating a swap partition, a ReiserFS partition for the OS, and another ReiserFS partition for your /home folder. Or something like that. If you look at the advanced options, the installer plans to set up your fstab to mount devices by their names, like /dev/sda2. I leave the swap partition as is, but I change the others. First off, I use ext3 because it's more backwards compatible with ext2. Next I create a few partitions for OS installations. This time I made 3 so that I have one for OpenSuSE 10.1, another to try out a different OS if I feel like it and still one more for my next upgrade. Each OS partition is 20GB. When I say "OS" partition I really mean the space to install a Linux distro and all the apps that I use for that particular installation. It also includes the home folder for the root user - /root. Everything that's not on an OS partition is in /home. On my last install I also made partitions specifically for holding backups (of my web server) and other specific types of data. That worked out for that PC but this time I'm not sure what I'll need so I'll resize my partitions with parted when I figure it out.
Now comes the clever part.