I was wondering what distro everyone thought was the best to use xfce with. I prefer xfce to gnome shell or kde. Salix is about the only system that I have spent a significant amount of time with using xfce though I have used the live disc of LMDE xfce and used xbuntu a little. I have been looking through some of the different distros, but I'm not sure which ones would be worth my time trying out and which ones wouldn't. Thanks for you responses in advance.

Xfce is Xfce no matter which you distro choose, so what are your wants/needs for the underlying system?

If you want long-term paid support choose Red Hat + Xfce; if you want rolling-release choose Arch + Xfce; if you want newbie-friendly community choose Ubuntu + Xfce; if you want familiar stick with Salix, etc.

"Which distro should I choose?" is a very frequently asked question around here, so I suggest you use the Search feature and visit sites like www.distrowatch.com to help your decision. In the end there is no substitute for burning a bunch of Live CDs/Live USBs and making up your own mind. Good luck!

I can only second that. I used XFCE on Debian and Slackware and it isn't different if you set it up the same way. Of course the underlying system of Slackware is different from Debian.

In an os, I like the philosophy of one application per task, and I also like the rolling release idea with being able to stay on the cutting edge. I'm not a big command line user but I am willing and want to learn to maybe one that has both the command line need and the option for graphical guis. I don't know if that helps or not? What is your opinion of zenwalk, crunchbang, salix, or gentoo?

If you want a rolling release distro than neither Zenwalk, Crunchbang nor Salix are for you. Gentoo or Arch would be, but you have to build them up yourself from the command-line. If you want XFCE with a somewhat easier distro (on that you can learn more about Linux) you may want to have a look at Linux Mint Debian Edition in the XFCE version, but that is currently only available as release candidate.

"Rolling release" really narrows the list down, most Linux distros are not rolling release. I recommend Arch for intermediate users and I hear good things about Gentoo for advanced users (I'm not there yet!)

Salix is my favourite Xfce because it sticks with the very stable Slackware repository. But if you want rolling release, get Mint, which is now out. I've been testing it this last week and just posted a mini-review on this site: I gave it 9/10.

CrunchBang and Vector Standard are posibilities, but not quite as polished, and neither is rolling release: see my reviews for more comments. An interesting experience was installing Mepis (KDE) and following the instructions on their website for converting it to Xfce, which worked fine.

I can't recommend any other distros: so often the alternative choices of GUI's seem to be a bit unloved and neglected.

I've tried mint but I didn't care much for it, though it switched to debian as a base it still felt like running ubuntu to me. Is gentoo difficult to build? Also, with it being source based, how exactly is that different from a binary based system?

I've never tried Gentoo, but the report is that building's is not so much difficult as tedious. The point about a source-based distro is that everything comes as source code and is then compiled on your computer. You have a script that will download each package, compile it, and install it, so you dont actually get to type "make" a thousand times! The idea is that everything will be optimised for your computer, but how variable are modern computers? Linus once said of Gentoo "I don't see the point" and I'm inclined to agree. But it has a lot of happy users, who don't mind that they took two days to install rather than twenty minutes.