I know there are tons and tons of these best distro threads, but I haven't found one that answered this question.

Lately I've become rather apathetic towards using Linux (as much as I love it and its cause) due to the fact that I have yet to find a distro that is closest in zippiness, etc. to (I know I know) XP. Frankly, I'm not always in the mood to try to get everything to work (like trying to get a perfectly tweaked Gentoo install).

I've found myself using XP more and more....mainly due to its cleanliness and zippiness.

Is there a distro that has the speed of Gentoo with the easiness of XP?

This is not an attack on linux; I still love it, I'm just tired of working so hard (it seems) to get something working.

Does what I speak of exist? Or are we still a few years off from an XP equivalent distro?

Thanks for the help.

Well here's my .02:
I run XP and Slackware 10 (current) as a dualboot on my laptop.
The only thing XP (on my box anyway) does better than Slack is crash, lockup and annoy the bejeezus out of me with the constant
patching, need for spyware removal and all the other joys associated with MS products use. The only reason it's still on the machine is my daughter.She uses it for schoolwork, email etc. She has no interest in "all that geeky Linux stuff" (her words not mine). Try Slack. I went through a "distro dancing" episode a couple of years ago and found good and bad in a lot of distros, but ended up back where I started with Slackware.

I have just installed VectorLinux and am so far (after about 10 minutes ) impressed with the speed and tweaked Slackware install.

Thank you all so much for your recommendations. I'll check them out.

tried debian?

yeah slack is great but the truth is i am waiting for libranet 3 (debian based) as i really liked libranet 2.8 and had been using it for 5 month and all that time it didnt give me any king of problem , even if u wanted to recompile a kernel u just had to push a button

I have not tried it yet as I have not had the time, but I have been hearing a lot of talk of Yoper being a very fast distro and super easy to install right out of the box so to speak. I ordered the CDs--just because I am lazy--and will give my views on it in the distro review section.

As far as I know, the most complete distro is Debian. But this one might not be enough "newbie-friendly", and maybe not as much up-to-date as those bellow.

Next would come SuSe, I think. Lots of packages. But I've always found that SuSe RPMs are a bit different than other RPMs of other distros...

My preference goes to Mandrake. It may be not as complete as SuSe, but then the PowerPack is very close, I think. And Mandrake's urpm-based tools are SO excellent!!! As good as Debian's apt, AFAIC. All's so easy in Mandrake.

That being said, "easiness" in Linux, whatever the distro, is very related to how much your hardware is automatically detected and configured.
If you're lucky, as I am with my tower-PC, it's almost all automatic, and whatever remains to configure (lan) is all GUI.
If you're unlucky, as I am with my ITX-PC, it's a pain all along, from kernel, to X, to GL, to...
But in the latter case, you really can't blame Linux, because most of the time, people work very hard to make the hardware work, but companies keep information to themselves, instead of helping, not speaking of making the drivers themselves like they do for Windows...

Yves.

I really enjoy stumbling my way through learning Slackware, it's exciting to learn every day and do all kinds of cool stuff, as well as know more than my OS-class prof within 2 weeks, since he uses Gnome on Red Hat and calls that "Linux Usage" (an OS class, and the section on Linux never goes deeper than GUI interface!! *peer*)

I also have Mandrake running on my tower at home, and I have to say that, for a windoze user, it's about the cleanest easiest and most powerful GUI-based newbie linux you can run, I like it a lot for its ease of use, and recommend it highly if you're too lazy to screw up your system occasionally, until you learn what you're doing.

So, Slackware rules, but Mandrake is the friendliest I've seen so far.. But I only installed Mandrake 'cause my roommate had a stack of install discs that he'd never used, and he let me copy 'em when he learned I was a budding pengy-head..

I'll keep Mandrake until I am more comfortable digging around in shell, but until then it's a lot spiffier if I want to show off how cool a non-windows OS is, to my friends..