Hey guys, thanks for having me.

I have a quad core Xeon Mac Pro, 6 gig ram, and Nvidia 8800gt graphics. Just wondering which distro will work best on a Mac. I currently am running Ubuntu Studio x64, and it runs awesome. I have piddled around with Fedora 10, and Open Suse 11.1 but these other distros always seem to have issues. Like having access to my internal media/software archive drives, sound issues in Fedora.
Even Mandriva seemed cool, but i could not even access my dvd/cd drive unless I had at least some disk in from a Mac OS X session, or a windows 7 session. (PERMISSION DENIED) 64 Studio seemed like a class act, but it wont mount my dvd drive, looses it just after boot. "Lost interupt"

I mainly enjoy multimedia stuff, 3d rendering (Maya, Houdini) and digital photo editing, and music creation ( M-audio midi keyboard, I use GarageBand in Mac)

Guess my question is should I be happy with Ubuntu, or continue my quest for something better or keep turning cd/dvd's into beer coasters.

Oh, I really do enjoy the eye candy. Programs that don't work right with compiz, i just temporarilly turn it off.

Thanks in advance.

One more thing.....Sabayon 4 looks verry interesting, but it hangs just before install in text or graphical.

I personally like Debian, What distro you use really depends on your preference, how much work you may want to put into it, and how well your hardware is supported, everything you describe in your specs should be supported well by any distro. What I might suggest is if you like Ubuntu Studio 64 but you have that one issue with the DVD then find out what model DVD drive you have and see if you can find anyone else with similar issues. Now that Macs are intel based pretty much anything for linus will work whether it is a MAC or a Dell, an HP a custom job or anything else.