I've been using quite a few distros trying to find one that will work with my setup. It's nothing complicated. 2 monitors, 1 connected via HDMI, the other MiniPort. The card is a Sapphire 6870 Flex. I've tried using Debian 6, not installing the graphical desktop and just installing per their ATIProprietary#Squeeze documentation and no luck. I've tried ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10... it hates allowing dual monitors without having one be glitchy(screen shake) or not allowed to de-mirror them. One monitor, fine, great, no problems, awesomeness. 2 monitors and it goes to garbage.

I'm an intermediate newbie. I work with linux every day but that's only as a server deploying tomcat and working inside of the command shell. This is my first foray into graphical linux and so far it's made me want to punch myself in the nether regions.

My question is this: Which distro, or base package, will give me the easiest time with installing my graphics card and not having 99 problems, being slow, or looking like garbage? If I have to download one and install drivers, I'm fine with that, as long as they work.

Debian 6 is simply to old for that card. If you want to go for Debian try it with Wheezy/Testing. AFAIK there can be problems with Gnome 3 and Unity and multi-monitor setups, so maybe you should try KDE or XFCE instead.

Thanks TobiGD. Congrats on 10k posts too.

Edit Question: Is there a good place to download Debian Wheezy? debian.org is like an 8 hour + download. I couldn't locate any mirrors in their current section which had a testing release there either.

For installing Wheezy (assuming that you have a wired connection to the Internet) I would recommend a network installation. Just download a netinst image for your architecture, i386 (32 bit) or amd64 (64 bit), from here: http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
It will come with only a minimal package-set and will download the other packages from a mirror that you can choose, so that you can choose one near you.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I ended up going with #! test which is based on wheezy and it's working great!