I've been a Slackware user for over 4 years. I just tested Arch Linux (derivative of Slack) and man that thing is a bullet!!
Even in my now 5 years old P4 1.7G it boots 25% faster that my beloved Slackware. It rocks.
And pacman (the package manager) it's outstanding. All in all it is easier than Windows,although I havent used in years now ;-)
I think I may "convert" to Arch.

Amen! Before, it was a toss up between Mepis and Kubuntu, but I recently discovered Kanotix and all I can say is WOW! I love it! Everything detected, runs fast, rock solid stable (at least for my self built system, your milage as with any distro may vary).

I also agree with another poster about Distrowatch not being the best gauge of a distro's performance. Just because its not at the top of the list, really has little to do with a distro's functionality. It's just that more people click on the hot distro of the week and the number go up. Distrowatch, IMHO, is more a gauge of a distro's exposure than actual performance.

The one and only Slackware.

Linspire 5.0

Arch Linux rocks :P

Mepis and PCLOS are live cds too, so shouldn't kanotix be on this list?

My favourite distro is Mepis, but being honest I would say distro of the second half of the year (2005) has to be kanotix with PCLOS second and Mepis third (Started great, but hasn't really advanced until end of 2005/beginnings of 2006)

Debian of course...or Slack ?

Debian, Vector

Rubix, Vector, Zenwalk, I love them all and wouldn't be here if not for Slackware, which I also love. I also like Arch, but like more stability. Pacman is the man

Debian Sarge gets the job done, fast, and trustworthy.

Slackware - rock solid

Arch - clean/simple, snappy, bleeding-edge, easy to update/maintain, adequate docs.

I have a gut feeling that Ubuntu will win this one because of the sheer number of newbies using it. Suse however, is the distro that I think has improved a lot over the years and is a pleasure to use on the desktop.

Gentoo has been my distribution of choice for two years now. I also use Suse 10 on my laptop, but my vote goes to Gentoo.

While I would never use it myself, I think Suse has made the greatest progress this year.