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.

[fameONE]

^What exactly don't you like about it? I heard OpenSUSE based servers are extremely secure.

I just got my hands on Kubuntu 8.10 and damn, I'm really disappointed with KDE 4. It has all the bells and whistles that Vista has (desktop widgets, window effects, etc). The Kubuntu repositories are endless, which is a plus, but my desktop just kept crashing. When it didn't crash, the screen kept jumping. I even deleted the partition and re-installed the OS, but I got the same problem.

[mipadi]

^What exactly don't you like about it? I heard OpenSUSE based servers are extremely secure.

1. The package manager is lame. It's balls-slow, and it's not well-updated -- there's a lot of newer software that doesn't have updated versions in the default repos, and some commonly-used software doesn't even exist in the repo. This is annoying for a typical home user, but even more annoying for me, because if someone asks for a piece of unsupported software, we have to compile and maintain it ourselves. This is a huge pain in the ass when you have a large network.
   
   Debian's repos are maintained much better. I'd even rather use Gentoo (although Gentoo lags behind on a lot of software, too).
   
2. The configuration tools suck. OpenSUSE uses a tool called YaST for configuration, which is slow, has an awful interface, and is -- dare I say it -- more difficult than just editing config files by hand. But again, it's ultimately a lot easier to use YaST (as opposed to hand-editing config files) when you're dealing with a large network.