I've tried most (though I am biased towards the slackware family)and the one distro that does what I want it to with the minimum of fuss is Zenwalk.
I'm now running 5 and I've no complaints. Only an installable Knoppix might tempt me away.

I started to try out Zenwalk last night, and had to quit at the partitioner.

Maybe not really the fault with Zenwalk, other than it would be nice if the installer found it possible to put Zenwalk onto a existing logical volume instead of the only choice being a reformat over the entire physical partition. Maybe it can be done easy, but its not obvious to me.

Distro tart that I am, my PC boots Gentoo, Mepis 7.0, PCLinuxOS, Debian Etch in Xfce mode, and Linux Mint. I am sometimes in a position to compare. The things that drive a choice, and even a change of mind can sometimes be subtle, and often marginal. Finding the one that is right for you can be a temporary affair, depending on what software you wanted to rock, and configuring away or living with the other baggage that comes with the distro.

Zenwalk will get its chance when I figure how to let it play without using 53GB to itself.

@GTrax

You don't have to repartition your drive, if you already have an available partition, you can skip the partitioning part and install there.

Hee Hee - you don't realize what a corner I had painted myself into.

The disk had a very typical partitioning from previous installations.
A first little partition about 100MB for a /boot (sda1),
A SWAP partition (sda2).
Then an 'extended' partition to hold more logical partitions (sda3), which should have reached to the end of the drive.. but didn't, and was also full with the distros.
Finally, the sda4 last primary partition, 53GB left over from being a videos/MP3 stash area.

The 'catch-22' situation is no sensible partitioner will modify a partition where the request comes from some distro running within it. The answer is to use an external tool from a LiveCD. First delete the sda4, and then gparted does a great job in simply letting one 'stretch' the short extended partition to reach to the end of the disk, and creating some new logical partitions. This I did, and now I have installed Zenwalk.

I did have that last partition available as lvm2 logical volumes, all ready to put distros on, but Zenwalk installer does not recognise these 'out of the box'.

Installing Zenwalk might be a bit of a challenge for outright beginner newbies straight out of XP-land. I am thinking of folk who would insert a CD and just wait, and who would never contemplate doing a Windows install except by taking the PC back to the shop, or finding a geek expert friend.

I think I must have missed an install option while navigating the choices. The installer is basic, yet way better than many in allowing you to go back and try again after a fumble, but I still ended up with a screen that hits maximum at 1024x768. Also Xfce4 does not appear to allow single-click mode on desktop icons (although it does in the file manager). How hard can it be to have this? Clearly some have asked, but not much have I seen as clear answers.

I would want to end up with a fast high-resolution desktop to be useful running a serious electronic CAD design suite like Geda, with Nvidia or ATI driver for the graphics card, and dual screens. CPU hardware monitoring too, and fast networking. Zenwalk can do it, but there will clearly have to be quite a lot of tweaking before I can begin on installing the applications.

Checking out the default kernel settings, found in /boot/config-2.6.x.x, I am really pleased to find the latency tick set to 1000Hz. This is something I need for real-time signal applications, and this Zenwalk is the first distro I have come across where I can have all that without a kernel re-compile. Looking at the other default settings, they are predictably generic, so as to make it run OK on the widest range of hardware possible. I can understand that, though I would tempted to mess with the kernel options eventually.

'Vector Linux' is being loaded into the next partition. Like Zenwalk, it is offered as a fast lightweight, yet all-capable distro based on Slackware. We compare some more, and see what happens

But such a person would never try installing Linux himself, would he? There are preinstalled Linux options in the market these days if someone wants Linux without doing absolutely anything I guess.

Zenwalk gets a report back from your monitor as to which is the right resolution for it. Some monitors just report a wrong maximum resolution. You'll only have to edit your xorg.conf. Or maybe is it that an nvidia propriatery driver is needed for your card? If that is the case, get one of the nvidia packages from the repos, depends on which card you have.

No idea about CAD. Nvidia drivers is easy: "netpkg nvidia". CPU monitoring too, you have endless options for that: the xfce cpu applet, gkrellm, conky etc... Fast networking really depends more on the network/hardware and not the OS.

Hope you like Zenwalk!

I have good cause to be evaluating Linux distros for an industrial need. Up to now, I have used Linux in place of Windows only casually. At work, I keep two W98 PCs in good order so we can access designs made with legacy software. One disk messed up so badly its data space had three 'gaps' in it.

I used a old Knoppix 3.9 LiveCD to fix it, but on the way, we had 4 days of running that machine off the LiveCD. It did everything asked of it, faster and easier than before. It found the network and printers by itself, and we just logged on as usual. Nobody noticed some MS Word documents saw the insides of Open Office. The PDFs displayed and printed as usual.

Certainly most of the passing users managed OK - despite noticing quite quickly that it was 'different', and none would try an install of any kind themselves, Linux or otherwise.

The Slackware family just seem to boot quicker and do everything smoother.
I've tried quite a few of them in my time: Frugalware, KateOS, Vector, GoblinX, Wolvix, , lil' ol' Austrumi.
Love them all! But Zenwalk is my favourite.

Just blowing dust here, but I would say it can be the best distro. Just as any other can be. For me this sits as a great mid point between the slackware foundation and almost a debian or any gnome-centric distro, which i actually prefer. This is a great distro to get anyone painted into a *buntu corner

sorry double post, feel free to delete unless your into padding numbers

i been a slackware user for years, i will say Zenwalk is an excellent distro and i found it quite nice, i did use Zenwalk-Core and instead of installing xorg packages i decided to do a little experiment and downloaded the source code of XFree86-4.7 and it built fine after a little tweaking, then built kde-3.5.9 and it makes a fine desktop/workstation...

zenwalk gives one the same feeling of archlinux but in a much easier fashion as it has a gui installer and the cli version is very robust.
easy to use and system runs flawlessly.

I do daily upgrades, and have yet to experience breakage when done from command line.

If the gui pacge manager becomes as robust as the cli., then it would be even easier to use.

Other than Zenwalk, my other favorites are Mepis(easiest distro to use); Linux Mint / Ubuntu;

every linux distro has certain perks or config options...but IMHO it doesnt matter...when you start to learn linux in and out...you learn to configure it on your own...slackware based distros are good for learning...but once you know how to manage your system without all the pretty tools you can build your own distro...and make it how you want. IMHO thats what linux (open source) is all about.

I agree with you on the slackware part but the only gripe I have with slack is no option to encrypt the filesystem at install.

I started out using RH back in 2000. I have since moved to SuSe, and then openSuSe 10.2 the last being installed on an old Dell Latitude CPx. The waiting for 1-2 minutes for really the most basic of programs to open, and sometimes up to 5 minutes for my web browser to open made me want to retire my old Dell.

I looked around for lightweight installations for older hardware. Three options came up, DSL, Vector, and Zenwalk. I went to install Vector, and even after years of using Linux I was amazed at how difficult to install it was. I setup my partitions, loaded it and then spent about an hour trying to get it configureed for even basic usage. I got the Xircom ethernet working, but didn't even try to get the NDISwrapper and my Linksys WUSB54GP USB wireless working. Out of sheer frustration I did the same as the above user, I held the power button down til it turned off.

Now I use DSL quite a bit for onsite data recovery, and am not even close to bringing myself to trying to use that if I could get away with it. That left Zenwalk 5.2. I loaded it on my desktop and was gobsmacked on how seamless, and quick it is. I use my Dell for 2-3 hours a day with no complaints. The relatively low sys req's are unbelievable, and the usability is great.

For my servers I don't know if I will ever move away from RHEL, or CentOS. My workstations when possible will definitely Zenwalk.

Obviously there's no "best" Linux distro because people value things differently. I've been trying out Zenwalk 5.4 Beta for the last couple days, though, and it's pretty nice. The new Xfce is good (usually I use Openbox, but I can live with this), and I needed OO3 for compatibility with my Arch distro (I like having several favorites... nothing wrong with that, right?)

Nice and solid distro. Kudos to the devs.