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I don't know who modded you down but I think it is unfair. If that is the norm when someone simply tells the truth then the person who modded you must not be very receptive of other views or just a fanboy.

I tried all Red Hat 7.* versions on the the desktop and deemed them unusable because of the ugliness of the desktop and probably my lack of experience. I used Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 then but I don't know what has become of Mandriva.

When Red Hat 8.0 came out that was the very first time I found a desktop that was not ugly with fonts that were worth looking at (because of Xft). I switched both my sisters' and parents' computers to this OS.

Red Hat 9.0 was a continuation of this and performed even better as a desktop but I was the only one running it. So when Red Hat 9.0 was EOL'ed I naturally looked towards Fedora Core 1.

Again I switched all computers to this new version and actually believed their promises that it would be just as good and stable as Red Hat before. This didn't turn out to be true as I would find out shortly.

I had specifically bought Ati Radeon 9200 graphics adapters because of their open source drivers (and I still use them). The included driver in Fedora didn't work well and the fglrx kept crashing the computer.

I didn't know what to do and kept explaining to my sister that to use the fglrx drivers was the least aggravating of the two options (no visible graphics or some kind of graphics). Upgrade woes added to the frustration.

In the end I decided enough is enough and switched to Slackware. That's what I've been running ever since. I have even ported it to MIPS lately. I probably won't ever have a need for another operating system anymore unless it's even better (Solaris?).

This experience has taught me that only Slackware, Debian, Gentoo (in the hands of professionals), Solaris and the BSDs are worthy and the others are just also-rans from a technical perspective.

Not to say that those (such as Ubuntu/Kubuntu) aren't easy to use, but just not as stable and well-engineered when looking at it from a system perspective.

I am repeatedly asked to remove OpenSUSE 10.1/10.2 and install Slackware because people don't want to deal with bugs, instability and slow performance particularly in a business setting.

The fact that all my relatives, friends and customers with Slackware desktops only ever call me when their hardware breaks down testifies to its stability compared to Windows and other Linux distributions.