OK, I confess I'm bored and want to play with distros again.

I'm considering the latest Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) or PCLinuxOS 2007 - is anyone running either of these at the moment can give me their views - I think Spezi or Flops were using PCLinux at one time - anyone running the latest Ubuntu?

That would be me - though you can just lurk in the ubuntu forums.
I have some notes. In fact, it's about time I updated that page because the issues have been solved.

I'm running this distro on a custom desktop: asus p5p-vm + i4300 1.8GHz, 128GigHDD and 1024MiB DDR, nv6800 agp. It is very very sweet on this system, which is hardly high-spec these days.

Also installed to 4x hp/compaq nx5000 laptops and eerything working out of the box except for the wireless LED - which was a one liner, and not a bug. These things are four years old, fully intel, and grunty enough for the full distro, including compiz/fusion with all the trimmings.

Those are the boxes in my possession. I have seen a couple of ubuntu installs fail.

I have a range of experience with different distros - Ubuntu is kindof a default. If you want to play, try an experimental distro. Something built with a specific aim in mind.

Yoper is fun just for the speed.
Sabayon is very pretty.

Minimal distros can be very cool and easy to customize. I had fun awhile ago with Zenwalk+Enlightenment ... a nice combination of names. But DR17 was too unstable back then.

And, of course, there's linux from scratch.

I just installed Mint (Ubuntu in some fancy clothes)---quite impressive. My default is still PCLOS, but there are a few annoyances and I'm still toying with several distros. My very close 2nd choice is Kubuntu (KDE instead of Gnome).

Someday, I will get a VM going but--for now--I simply keep 6-8 distros installed in a multi-boot setup.

I left Ubuntu after having serious problems with Edgy (6.10). I've come back to it now because it has improved so much. I have a laptop with Broadcom wireless and it is trivial to get it working, something that cannot be said for most distros I've tried. PCLinuxOS has never excited me but that is just a personal preference.

Flips;

It's a matter of preference..I'm running both and I like both. If you're trying to get away from windows and that "look and feel", then give 7.10 a try again. It runs great. But I personally prefer PCLOS 2007....everything was OTB for me on my PIII 2.8, 512MB Intel 865GLC integrated graphics.

I am using pclinux 2007 at the moment and so far so good. I have gateway mx6750 laptop and in the past 2 weeks i tried fedora 7,8 opensuse 10.3 and mandriva 2008. I had problems with cd/dvd burning with my philips sdvd8441 drive under all those distros but it worked in windows. Anyways the drive is messed since its getting slower under windows as welll so i got an external burner.

Anyways i cannot install ubuntu on this machine, it gives me an input error during install and if anyone can help me boot fromthe external disk id appreaciate it. But anyways pclinux has worked great. Compiz works no problem and the kickoff menu works seemlessly. For some reason it was bugged (or atleast on my machine) on suse and mandriva. I did not like fedora 8 for some reason just felt slow on my machine.

openSUSE and mandriva 2008 are great but to my surprise pclinux 2007 works better. So try out different distros and eventhough pclinux ships with older kernel, it works better on my machine and hopefully i will stick with it until i replace it with slackware

I was a Suse user until they really borked the 10.1 release. I tried Ubuntu 6.04 and upgrade every 6 months. It just get better every release. The Ubuntu community is exceptionally helpful and plentiful. I've been amazed to see performance improvements with each release. I have a DIY desktop and a Dell 1420n which came preloaded with 7.04. Both are now running 7.10. I can't imagine being more satisfied.

It really depends on your taste. Here are some advantages to each.

Ubuntu:
-Enormous community. much larger than the PCLOS and this community.
-Packages, packages, packages. Ubuntu currently has over 20000+ packages in its repositories.
-In my opinion, an excellent security team. PCLinuxOS as far as I'm aware of doesn't really have one.

PCLinuxOS:
-excellent GUI tools, polished up from Mandriva. Ubuntu only has restricted-driver-manager and the various Gnome tools.
-Refined KDE desktop, works faster than Kubuntu.
-It's the only RPM distro that uses apt-get.

As you can see, you have to make up your own mind. If polish and ease of use are a concern, then I would point you to PCLinuxOS. If you don't mind using the terminal and want access to tons and tons of packages, plus a predictable 6 month release schedule, then you should consider Ubuntu.

Either way, it's all Linux.