I tried Arch linux and liked it a lot. But a lot of things were broken in it that I could not figure out and the community is a little mean sometimes. Not to me personally, but I saw many point out that Arch was not for newbies and therefore, should start with Mandriva or another "simpler" distro. I also liked slackware a lot, but didn't stick to it because I wanted something that was i686 optimized and something with a package manager. So I tried Rubix, which I can't say if it was excellent because it would not boot after the installation. I will try it again later on, but for now, I am sticking with frugalware.

The instalation is really straightfoward. Pretty much slackware. ncurses. It worked for me. Did a pacman -Syu and updated successfully.

All the programs that I used were there and the screen looked really good on my laptop running gnome.

That is pretty much where I am right now.

Going to install shareaza with wine.
Will post more if stuff comes up.

Not many problems so far. I recommend this to everybody who uses slackware, gentoo, arch or debian. Great distro and getting better.