What Linux distro do you currently recommend?

[Dave S]

Hey Shelter Bar,

My brother gave me his "old" laptop (when I say "old", it's actually got a 
1GHz faster processor than my main desktop machine FFS!) and I'm wondering 
what Linux distro to install on it.

I'm going to dual boot with WinXP for music stuff.

So, my choices (not in any particular order) are:

1. Gentoo - I've been using it on my desktop for quite a few years now, still 
pretty happy with it, though the compile time and amount of set-up required 
for stuff sometimes pisses me off.  Also seems that the "quality control" of 
things marked "stable" isn't what it used to be... though I'm still very 
happy with it for the most part.  It's quite a lot of work to begin with 
though, and I'm wondering if really it's worth it?

2. Ubuntu - Seems everybody raves about it, and really, as long as it has most 
of the apps I want, I can manually compile anything else I need, so no 
problem.

3. Something else / better?  What do you recommend these days?

PCLinuxOS?  Sabayon?  Both seem popular according to distrowatch. I have a 
Sabayon CD here, and have been using it as a live CD recently - seems OK, but 
really, I think I'm missing the point of it in some ways, and would probably 
rather just go with vanilla Gentoo, if I'm going to go that route.

I don't know anyone who uses PCLinuxOS, so don't know much about it, but it 
seems like most of the reason people go for it is as a live CD?  I want to 
install, so awesome live CD isn't particularly high on my list of priorities. 
(Though that's why I have the Sabayon CD, because it's actually pretty good.)

Also, I would prefer a community-driven distro to a company-driven distro such 
as Fedora.

Mostly I'll be doing web work, graphics, a bit of hacking around, maybe some 
sound if I get along with the apps.  (I still find I just don't get along 
with Linux audio apps, which isn't to say I have tried them all, but perhaps 
doing it on Gentoo leaves too much to be desired?)

I'm quite tempted to go with Ubuntu (in fact, I feel like I've pretty much 
talked myself into it and am looking more for reasons NOT to go with it), and 
then set it up with KDE (my window manager of choice).  I know I could use 
Kubuntu, but I think I'd rather start from a default Ubuntu and then just add 
KDE to it... or maybe even give Gnome a spin and see how I get on.

Finally, does anyone have personal experience of using the Fuse NTFS-3G 
drivers? From everything I've read, they seem to be great, but some personal 
endorsements from my mates always bolster confidence.

Cheers,

~Dave