I did use Ubuntu dual booting on my laptop: 4GB RAM, Centrino 2 - 2.26GHz, 9600GT and 320GB HDD. That was until it completely fucked up and I had to take it away from repairs for about 6 weeks >.

At heart I am a debian user, but a few years ago I made the switch to gentoo. The config files are much simpler and if you compile a lot of things yourself having it resolve dependencies for src packages in a non-broken way is nice. Particularly, I like to compile bloaty apps such as firefox, X, etc with icc, force it to use Fourier-Motzkin and use it's dynamic usecase optimization feature which seems to help alot with branch prediction. I usually get a 30-40% speedup.

Lately though, I've been giving ArchLinux a try. I like the simple as possible, build up instead of strip out philosophy and it's been fairly decent so far.

All of these beat the fedora machine I have to use at work which is almost as bad as windows.

I am not a masochist, just OCD, a bit of a control freak, and incredibly impatient. :P

Ubuntu on Dell Laptop (not bought pre-installed) and a CentOS home server.

Hey, anybody that's familiar, what do you think of GNOME vs. KDE?

^^KDE 3.5 was OK but 4 was a disaster. It put me off KDE totally. I don't know if it has improve since I last use it but reports seems to point at it still being buggy.

So to answer your question, base on the current latest "stable" release, Gnome has my vote.

Ubuntu 9.04; I repeatedly try Kubuntu (to see if I like KDE yet; no luck so far even though they're moving faster than GNOME) and Fedora (to see if I could handle alternative distros; again no luck as I couldn't get proper graphics drivers or Flash to work correctly last time).

For openSUSE, I'm finding I like KDE better. It operates more quickly and it's better organized, as well as being easier to maneuver through. openSUSE's utilization of GNOME sucks, if you ask me. Stupid Application Browser.

For other distros (as I've been toying around with Fedora, and I've used a good deal of Ubuntu), I'm more comfortable with GNOME.


I'm also debating trying out gNewSense to see how I feel about GNU. This one's designed after Ubuntu, so it'll be an interesting one to note.

And I've decided I may want some Windows-esque system running on it as well, so I may try out Tiny Vista, if I can get a damned torrent that has any seeds.


Right now, I'm in the process of restarting that system again and going with openSUSE 11.1 KDE for the primary (and the one setting up GRUB), then installing Fedora (which gets the Fedora 11 Leonidas update in just under two weeks! yay!). Those two are definitely going on it, but I may toy around with Ubuntu (9.04), gNewSense (Deltah), and Tiny Vista (pft, who knows what version. Whichever one I can freaking get I guess).

I'm using ubuntu 9.04, but i prefer 8.10, this version "beeps" too much for me, and is a bit slower than the previous, but it will improved in the next weeks so you are sure to have a good OS with Ubuntu.

Well, I have debian atm and 2x ubuntu on other 2 computers. However I might switch to archlinux someday. I think first distro I used was mandrake. :)