Oh, I almost forgot this thread... D: But thanks for your answers anyway. I ended up testing Mandriva 2010.2 with KDE desktop. Some notices:
-The installer is excellent, much better than any Windows installer I've ever used. One won't need much knowledge to use it, except for dualboot, as the default partition option will wipe the windows installation from the disk.
-Hardware support is very good as well. The PCI-USB extension card worked out of the box. Even my cheap DVB stick works really well. Kaffeine found it instantly and channel search took about 5 minutes. (On Windows, the driver and software installation took almost an hour and channel search another hour.) Plus the Windows software is buggy.
-The old IBM webcam didn't work; there's apparently no driver for it. But that's not a big problem as I never use that camera.
http://www.linux-usb.org/ibmcam/
-The graphics card (Radeon x800 XL) works but the driver doesn't provide the best performance and there's no proprietary driver available. It's works well enough for everything except heavy 3D stuff like gaming. Old ATI cards don't seem to be the best option for Linux...
-KDE isn't the fastest desktop environment. Windows XP desktop isn't any faster however.
-Some fonts look messy, especially on some web pages. I think such problems didn't exist when I tested live Xubuntu some time ago. Might be a graphics card issue.
-Some video and audio codecs aren't available from the official repositories. It took a while to find out that I needed to add PLF repositories to the package manager.
-Localisation of most software is far from perfect. Sometimes the default (english) interface is better than partially translated (or even worse, machine translated) version. This is one of the drawbacks of open source software. Windows is translated by professionals and the result is much better.
