A year and a half ago I switched to Linux from Windows and haven't looked back. My first distribution was Mandrake Linux, a very newbie friendly distro, which was perfect for me in the beginning. Later I grew to look for an alternative because I was bored with most everything working well and wanted more of a challenge, and the failures of the package management system were becoming very apparent. I deemed myself experienced enough to go with a distro with less hand-holding. I started looking for a non-rpm based distro and seriously considered Debian but rejected it because I wanted a more up-to-date distro in general and KDE3 in particular.
A while ago I installed Gentoo Linux 1.4 and it's fast fast fast! KDE is really snappy now on my old machine (k6-2 with 450 MHz and 192 MB RAM) and the heavy graphics on this site scroll much smoother. Gentoo is a source based distribution, which mean I get to compile everything. There is a very useful utility called Portage for it however, so it is automated and actually works better and simpler than rpm stuff. It takes time, but the end result is worth it, IMHO. The change has been surprisingly radical, although I'm not sure how much is creditable to optimizing everything for my machine and how much it is the new compiler version, gcc 3.2 versus 2.96. <i></i>
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