Right, now I'm Kanotix user (yes, not Kanopix - Kanotix) wich is Debian based.
I'm getting frustrated because a lot of shortcuts and some apps don't work, I'm being told nobody cares about that distro anymore. Also it looks ugly in general if you open stuff. (Yes, even computer science girls like to keep their house pretty ^^)

On my own I rounded up to openSuse, Mandriva or Kubunto. Hope I'm not to far from the good stuff.

I've to do this huge project on a "Microsoft free" lab so I'm scare out of my wits of uninstalling the current distro and something going wrong with the new. That would probably imply failing since I'm alone on a foreign country :S (I always wonder how I get into these situations lol).

Thing I'd like in my new distro:
- Will be "alive" for a long time
- Looks good (maybe in a macOS sort of way)
- Easy to install
- Easy to maintain
- Programs I'll be using: eclipse, skype, firefox, decent pdf viewer, decent image viewer, editor to program (python, C, perl, lisp, java if eclipse not available)
- Good community / way of sorting out questions
- Helper to install new software (something like aptitude maybe, heard smart is good as well)
- support for laptop
- I'm used to KDE and heard Gnome has a lot of bugs

Laptop specs (it's 4 years old but still looking good ^^):
- Intel® Pentium® M 735 (1.7 GHz)
- 1400x1050 res
- 512 MB SODIMM DDR
- ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 (M11) 128 MB DDR, AGP 4X

I hope I'm not asking for too much anyway I'll settle for realistic stuff of course.

Anybody who helps me out will be from here on regarded by me as something close to a g(r)ee(c)k hero.

Your 3 choices are good. I suggest taking a look at Fedora as well.

I'd suggest taking one that's in the top10 of distrowatch

Its Kubuntu by the way.

<edit>kotoko, where is your name from?</edit>

From a Manga called Chobits, actually kotoko is a robot/laptop kind of thing.

I wonder if this thread is in the wrong place and I should repost in the distros section...

Yah, report it and have a moderator move it, don't start a new thread.

The reason I asked about the name is because I spent some time in Ghana, West Africa, and one of their soccer teams was Kotoko.

I heard good things about people using kubuntu on there laptops

Hi

What about Gentoo?

FC6 is real neat, the only reason I moved to Gentoo was to try something new. My laptop boots in just over 30 secs now. This was done from a stage3 install b.t.w.

Other than that I'd recommend Ubuntu, not that I've used it much but as it's the most popular Mr S must be doing something right. Here again install by bootstrapping as this gives more control and a better understanding over how the system is built up.

Have fun

On a hardware related note: I'd suggest you think about upgrading to 1GB RAM - I've found running Eclipse _and_ trying to do anything else at the same time can be a bit painful sometimes (to say the least) without more memory.