Found the distro im going to use

If you are going for Kubuntu than you should probably look at Mepis and Knoppix also. Knoppix is one of the original (if not the original) live Linux distros and it has excellent hardware detection. Mepis is basically a really good Linux take on Kubuntu with a focus towards multimedia. Since all of those distros are Live then I would recommend if you are able to download all of them, and either burn them and boot them to try it out, or use a virtual machine program to try them out without having to exit Windows.

rmriggin...way to bring up last year's threads

but while we are brining back the dead, here are my comments on what you said:

MEPIS -- not quite sure about the *latest* (beta) release but stable is suffering MAJOR memory leaks due to poor KDE configuration most likely. some other kde 3.5 features broken as well.

KNOPPIX -- not designed to be a harddrive installed distro. it was built as a live cd and shall remain so. too many people have screwed up dependencies in that distro b/c its an obscure mix of debian unstable, testing, and some custom packages that once you do an apt-get upgrade all hell breaks loose.

to throw in a contender: PCLinuxOS 2007 (currently Alpha...final coming soon) -- great.. based on mandriva originally, but as of 2007 the desire of the project leader (Texstar) to move AWAY from mandriva is burning so it is one of the most important priorities of the project for the 2007.1 (perhaps 2008) release. comes with many media plugins out of the box, installations are done through RPM packages...but it uses APT for RPM and Synaptic so you really can't tell it apart from Debian if you dont know what to look for. May i add that its also FASTER than Kubuntu and doesn't have the memory leak issues of Mepis

perhaps i'd maybe even throw Sabayon (gentoo based) and PC-BSD (FreeBSD) into the mix....both still working on things...but coming along nicely.

I have to second PCLinuxOS . It rocks and was always my favorite. I am now using SAM linux which is an xfce based fork of PCLinuxOS. Elive ok and Sabayon nice too.

The great thing about Linux is its free. So try out whatever distro you want and if you do not like it then try another. Just remember to back up your data!

Funny thing about all but one of the Distro's mentioned so far. They are all derivitaves of Debian... Why not just run Debian??? I've been running the "etch" testing tree for about 6 months on my dell e1705. Runs great. When Etch went stable I changed my soures to "lenny". Now I'm good for another couple of years. It sooooo easy to run and is very up-to-date and very stable. Its not as cutting edge as "unstable" but everything works and I have no problems doing anything. Even gaming......You may want to check it out........

PDR60

Well, I use Scientific Linux as it comes with all the tools I need as a programmer. For regular users I would recommend Ubuntu or Suse. Suse is more userfriendly in most cases...

Bith suse and ubuntu have exellent support on their forums

after trying out many distros i found Mandriva 2009.1 best for me.
i was an old fan of Mandrake (after using RedHat 6.2) i used mandrake till 10.1 then lost touch for quite some time....

now even though there are many other distros i find Mandriva easly configurable..

For me anymore it's openSUSE for KDE, and Ubuntu for gnome.