Eversince Ubuntu 8.04 came out I'm hopping from distro to distro trying to find one that works.
Ubuntu worked perfectly until now. But recent updates even broke 7.10 for me, so there's no going back either. I get hard lock-ups on both 7.10 and 8.04... same for my sister.
I tried PCLOS-2007 - refused to connect to my router after some time.
PCLOS-2008 boots into a kernel panic
It's still in beta, so no suprise there.
OpenSuse 11 - scroll wheel won't work despite that it's configured exactly as on every other distro, and that I never had a problem with that after Suse 9.2 In addition I get a "knotify crashed" on every startup, and various programs I installed didn't work as expected.

Gentoo/Slackware:
I'm sorry, but I neither have the time nor the ambition to compile my stuff... I know about the pre-compiled packages, but the selection isn't very amazing, and I'd still have to spend a lot of time compiling.
Fedora... well... Fedora 7 if anything, and I'm not the biggest fan. I'd still end up with a couple of extra repos that are bound to break the system sooner or later.
I'll download Madriva now and hope for the best.
Debian... I'm kind of sympathizing with debian, but the packages are too damn old.

Maybe it's a problem with my hardware... but XP runs fine... as fine as XP can run anyways.

It's a shame... everything worked basically trouble-free from Ubuntu 5.something to 7.10.

Have you looked at CentOS (think unbadged RHEL). Look and feel of a fedora release, but stable. Just updated to 5.2, so a more modern desktop suite than 5.1 (which still had firefox 1.5 for example)

I didn't really seriously consider it. There isn't really a strong community behind it, and I'm expecting the packages to be about as outdated as the debian ones. I'd rather go with debian in that case.
Optimally I would like Ubuntu back, but it doesn't look like this will happen any time soon... Maybe I should consider going all the way back to 6.06. At least I know that the latest release of that one still worked.

It's rebadged RH, so it's got more "grunt" behind it than Ubuntu (not trying to start a flame). Have a look at the package versions on distrowatch for any of the distros you're looking at btw

Ah well... I'll see it when I install it. Let's find something that boots up first :P
I've used Etch for some time, and I just recently used their repo again to get stuff for my eeepc... I ended up compiling most of it. I don't need cutting edge, but if it's older than 2 years, and the project is in heavy development...
Well, I'll be downloading CentOS too then.
Along with the Ubuntu 8.10 alpha-1
Am I being too optimistic?

Debian sid is about as current as you can get aside of things that don't really work yet (like kde4).

If all and every distribution fails where before at least one worked flawlessly I'd suspect hardware to be the cause.
On some of your many live cd's you should have "memtest" as a boot option?
...but you probably ruled that out already...

CentOS has worked really well so far. It's very familiar since I've used Fedora before. The wiki isn't always correct, and sometimes misleading. For example they tell you to edit inittab and reboot instead of just using telinit to change the runlevel.
The package availability didn't exactly blow me away. I'll be going through the extra repositories and see what I can find. This is not going to be a very upgradable system when I'm done with it.
I'll just stick with it for now. Mandriva seems nice, but it's like dating an ugly girl. You can slap makeup on, put her in a nice dress, but she'll still have the default bootsplash and gdm theme...

If you have an i686 or x86_64, I'd very highly recommed Arch Linux. The community is mostly good. Sometimes it'll seem sort of like a Mac community where they ask you why you're doing it that way. Just be firm and say you want to do it that way. At least that's what happened when I asked someone to make suggestions to my partition scheme.

What I liked about the package manager is how it can manage everything. Supposedly it handles rpms and debs, but I haven't tried those. It also handles both tarballs (.tar.gz and tar.bz2). What was also great was how easy it is to use pacman (the package manager). So although it works with binaries (with the option to compile), you have almost as much freedom to configure it as you would with Gentoo. The setup is definitely easier/faster to get through.

Perhaps Linux is not for you.

What is it with all that hostility lately......

According to distrowatch the package selection of Arch is pretty poor. I'm already pretty annoyed with centos that there is no recent compiz version available except from some very obscure community repos - I'm so used to the desktop zoom, I don't want to give it up. Let alone less popular choices like Listen (music player), Openmovieeditor, hydrogen. Or even more popular packages like brasero, gnomebaker...
I think I'll give PCLOS another chance.

He's just cranky because he recompiled the kernel for the 50th time and got some stupid option wrong AGAIN.
All hail Slackware!

One wonders why he would specifically put "100% pure" - slackware in his profile. He knows it's a freaking archievement to get this monster to do anything useful. If you like it like that, that's ok with me, but it doesn't have to be this way.

No, you're absolutely right. I do not like linux. I get a nervous breakdown when I use XP, and I'd rather walk into a prison shower in a pink tutu than get a mac.
I'm sorry to say it, but they all suck. For a while there Ubuntu didn't suck. The good times are over.

oooohhhh, god forbid you might have to compile something, it might kill you, because running a slackbuild script is so hard.