Sorry if this is in the wrong forum... wasn't exactly sure where it would fit.

After spending a weekend trying to get catalyst to work on Arch and getting absolutely nowhere (actually, I think I'm worse off than when I started), I'm getting pretty fed up. So I was curious what distros ATI users have been able to get catalyst working on (especially if you have my card, HD 4870x2).

I've got and HD4850 running on Slackware 12.2 and using the ATI driver. However to be honest, I did manage to bork the X system completely the first time I installed the ATI driver, but it seems to be running fine now.

Not using that card, but Ubuntu has proved to work nicely with some ATI cards (one of them mobile, worked fine too) without manual installation of drivers. Of course it depends on the model, and surely there are models at any given time that require you to do at least some manual work, but for a lot of models the Restricted Drivers Manager tool of Ubuntu does a nice job (basically a window where you can click to install drivers for a piece of hardware if there are drivers on the reposities that are known to work with it).

With Slackware I have experience only with older Radeons (like 9200), but it did work back then. My guess is that the distribution shouldn't matter that much, provided that you have everything else needed---except if there's a prepackaged driver available that you can just add to the system rather than install it manually.

I'm running Debian (testing) and have had a ATI Radeon 9550 card for 4.5 years. ATI Catalyst is sitting on my KDE menu and running perfectly since it first appeared (in both normal & superuser mode). No problems with installation whatsoever.
cheers,
jdk

Hm, is slackware debian based? From what I've been hearing it seems that Debian and Debian based distros are having less issues with catalyst, but it may just be a coincidence. Assuming it's not though, I'll probably try debian (i don't like having a de/wm pre-installed). The only other disto i really had in mind was gentoo (not that I heard it was good with ati or anything, I just wanted to try it).

Perish the thought! Slackware is Slackware, the oldest surviving distro out there. Given that you're also looking at Debian and Gentoo, Slackware wouldn't be much of a stretch to get going. However, I would do a little research before making your decision.