Currently, I use Slackware. I have not had any problems with it at all EVER. It all started when I was in middle school and my friend said to me at lunch, "You should try linux" and pointed me to zipslack, at the time I had a dial up internet connection. I tried zipslack and managed to get by reading man pages and finally connected to the web through a dial up modem and lynx (or links - I don't remember) and started wget'ing the Xfee86 packages. It was then I learned of dependencies... A few weeks later I was turned on to Debian Potato, started downloading the install cd's few days later they were finished and I started the install on my compaq presario laptop that had a 233mhz amd cpu. Finally I installed X and after much blood sweat and tears, got windowmaker running. Debian on a laptop! I thought I was hot stuff. After that I just went crazy trying everything I could find, even went to CompUSA and bought SuSe but that did not run very well on my now ancient hardware. Years went by when I put linux in the back of my mind always meaning to get back to it. Then I tried Fedora Core 6, After one week of trying to get the nvidia drivers to work, finally saw the nvidia logo pop up (thanks to Option ModeValidation "NoVertRefreshCheck" in my xorg.conf) and installed cedega and a few games, they blew away the performance of windows and fell in love and started getting everyone I knew to use it. Fighting night after night with it on other people's computers, decided to give in and download Ubuntu (edgy eft at the time). To my great suprise it installed perfectly with no extra tweaking on my brothers computer - he uses it to this day. My wife's laptop was a bit of a pain to make Ubuntu work with her sound card (I remember staying up till 7am trying to make it work, she was sleeping next to me, and I rebooted the computer and then the african drum things played for the first time. I woke her up in a fit of excitement "OMG DID YOU HEAR THAT!!!? SOUND! Now I just need to get wireless working.") It was a snap to get ndiswrapper going and since then I have been upgarding her to each new version of ubuntu, fighting with wifi and sound each time, though with the latest release the ati video card was working out of the box and therefor so did compiz. So although nobody wanted a linux autobiography, those have been the most important linux times for me. For my own machines, I do not mind spending a week compiling everything I need or rebuilding a kernel 15 times in a row to make my system just right for me. So, my vote is Slackware. Though when I build me next desktop it will be Gentoo.