Begining CVS

Hello ! CVS becomes more and more necessary when we develop big projects and developing in a team... I were learning how to use CVS, but some problems (that maybe i think it's critical) like cvs dont recognize deleted/added directories/files let me think about to learn a better version of cvs (must be open source) so i've choosen subversion. i would like to know from you (experimented with both CVS and subversion) wich is better and wich is more portable and wich is the better expérience to acqueer... thanks