So I'm looking for some new distro recommendations. I'm finally ditching Ubuntu on my laptop after over 2 years, with the last two releases I've just had more and more issues with bugs (although most have been fixable/workaroundable) but more importantly the performance on my laptop has degraded significantly the last two releases.

I've installed openSUSE to try out the KDE again, not sure if I like it or not but it's grown on me a bit the few days I've used it. It is noticeably quicker and more responsive with KDE4 with eye candy enabled than Ubuntu with the basic Gnome install. But I have to say I HATE yast. I'm thinking of Debian, but not crazy about the long release cycles and the strict adherence to FOSS. Another I've thought about was Arch but am a bit worried about how bleeding edge it is, I want the latest and greatest but only if they work properly.

What are some of your recommendations for a good new distro for my laptop? I want something up to date, but not so bleeding edge that things break. I want something that will be quick and responsive on my laptop and not so bloated and/or buggy it makes it crawl (like Ubuntu was doing). Preferably a distro that does a good job implementing both Gnome and KDE. I'd prefer to have some nice handy GUI tools for configuration of all things desktop related (although not a deal breaker) and a distro that makes it easy to get non free software/drives/plugins/codecs (openSUSE didn't work too well hear...the repositories seemed to be a bit outdated and it caused issues with the movie player where it crashes when I open it but if I hit relaunch from the crash window it will open). Any opinions or recommendations are appreciated. I haven't really tested anything new in the last year or so, so figured I'd get some opinions on the current state of other distros before I end up installing 10 different ones in an attempt to find the right one.

Marx

If you are looking for performance maybe the desktop is more significant than the OS; have you considered Xfce?

Well, KDE4 (with effects turned on) runs perfectly fine on my laptop with openSUSE. I'm not sure I want to stick with KDE or SUSE though. However Gnome should run fine on it to, just every new release of Ubuntu it seems the performance just got worse and worse. Compared to openSUSE booting took twice as long, loading took twice as long, opening new applications takes twice as long. Ubuntu used about twice the memory. This is my first time really trying out KDE4 but from everything I've heard, Gnome should still be a bit lighter weight than KDE4 to begin with. And I've also noticed some browsing bugs (particularly with .ASP pages...which I always just attributed to MS being piss poor at making sure their implementations work across platforms/browsers) have completely disappeared. It's just a lot of little things in the last two releases that have built up and finally made me decide to ditch it. But the computer should be capable of running a modern desktop environment (maybe not with all the effects) quick enough to not feel sluggish like it was.

What about Slackware or Arch mjeffer?

whats your thoughts on those 2?

I'm interested in trying Slackware...I honestly haven't used it since 97ish when I first started experimenting with Linux. However I'd probably prefer to start with that one on a spare system or virtual machine to get the hang of it first. I've been considering Arch, I played with it before a while back and have heard good things, but have also heard things can occasionally break on you due to it's bleeding edge nature. I'm not sure how true or often that happens in practice. I may just go ahead and try it for a bit and see how it goes. I can always just go to Debian but it just seems so boring. Kind of want to try something new and exciting just can't figure out or make up my mind where to turn.

I've been using Arch for about one and half years and never had a major break. (I thought I had a major break once, but it turned out to be a hardware problem - graphics card died.) I've had very few minor issues also, and I could have avoided those if I had bothered to actually read the news page or check the forums before upgrading.

All of which is to say, Arch has broken things for me less often that Ubuntu did with regular old updates.

But, you do have to pay a little closer attention. The safest thing is whenever a major upgrade happens, kernel or core system stuff, wait a few days before upgrading and follow the forums and news page for potential trouble.

EDIT: Oh, and non-free stuff is readily available. They don't have separate repos for non-free software. (Which I've seen them get criticized for.) Stuff they can't package and distribute themselves for licensing reasons, like VirtualBox PUEL, is inevitably available from the Arch User Repo.

I installed arch last night and am liking it so far. My biggest issue has been accidently starting to type apt-get out of habit :P. It's going to take some time to get set up how and with what I want but I like the fact that it will only have what I want on it. Also I have to say their online documentation has been top notch. It explains in detail exactly what you need to get certain things going (without skipping important steps...which some tend to do) that I wasn't used to doing via CLI, like setting up a wireless connection with WPA2.

Installation went off almost without a hitch. Only problem I had is wpa_supplicant didn't work on the net-install live environment...didn't seem to want to associate anything to my wireless card...but once everything got install worked perfectly. I do have to read up about PKGBUILD as it seems some of the stuff I want I'll have to use that for.

Allow me to recommend using bauerbill as an AUR helper. (And to speed up package downloads in general.)

So I started looking into bauerbill and it's left me a bit confused as to what exactly to use. PKGBUILD is pretty easy and straight forward once I looked how to do it. But when I looked at bauerbill it said it was a wrapper for powerpill which is a wrapper for yoaurt which is a wrapper for pacman...what's the difference between all these and other than increased download speed and a CLI tool to access the AUR repos are there any advantages to them?

It is easy enough to download the PKBGUILDs and just use makepkg. Although I like pbget to help with at least fetching the PKGBUILDs. I'm lazy.

Bauerbill just integrates easy access to the ABS, AUR, and the regular repos. Powerpill was an earlier pacman wrapper by the same person, which Bauerbill builds on. They use aria2, combined with reflector, to connect to and simultaneously download from multiple servers. (Bauerbill can also use rebase to synchronize the pacman database with the servers.)

So if I want to install, say, pbget from the AUR, with bauerbill
And it handles everything else. In this case, if you ran it as root, it will ask for a user to build as, or you can include that info right away
If you want to do a full system upgrade of everything, including updated packages from the AUR, you could do
(One tends to alias these as they get complex.)

If I want to rebuild an official package from source, say, firefox