Best Linux Distro, For Personal Computer Use Options

[fameONE]

I've had Ubuntu and Fedora on two of my machines for a good 5 months now. Personally, I've become a huge, huge fan of Linux and I don't see myself switching back to Windows or crossing over to the dark side of Mac anytime soon (aside from government computers, of course).

Well, I just picked up Mandriva and it runs even smoother than the other distributions that I have. My mediocre Dell Insprion 6000 now operates like an XPS or Alienware computer, in terms of speed. After a few hours playing around on the terminal, I managed to install Fruity Loops 7 XXL Producer Edition as well as the racing game GRID. Everything runs smoothly.

Still, I can't seem to figure out which Linux distro is the best. Each one I've acquired has been better than the one before. For the Linux users, what distros are you running on your machines? What do you personally recommend?

edit: KDE is growing on me. I'm still partial to Gnome, but KDE 4.1 looks clean.

[mipadi]

At work (I'm an assistant systems administrator) we use OpenSUSE. I can unequivocally say that it sucks, and I don't recommend using it. Configuration is a pain in the ass, and the package management is terrible and slow.

At home, I use Gentoo. It's nice and I like the package management, plus I know what's installed and running on my machine at all times, because I put it there. The only downside is that installing something like X Windows or KDE or GNOME can take upwards of 1/2 a day.

In our apartment, we also have a couple machines running FreeBSD, which is really nice, too. Plus it doesn't have all the annoying political crap that comes with using Linux.

Actually, to be honest, most of the time at home, I use a Mac. Why? It's got all the cool Unix-y things I like about Linux, without all of the pain in the ass stuff. I maintain a Linux network all day, and I usually don't want to keep doing that when I come home at night.