My two main distro's for the past x years, Ubuntu and Gentoo.

I used to love Ubuntu, not only for it's easy installation but most and fore all because of it's stability. I really appreciated their quick release cycle while maintaining a decent desktop experience.

Somehow, after 8.04 things went downhill for me. Less stable, more bloat and inconsistent UI approaches throughout subsequent releases.

Never a fan of KDE I have used Gnome for quite a while, but in the end I preferred E17 over any other.

So, when 11.04 came out, and I upgraded the install running on my laptop. I was willing to give Unity a chance. It wouldn't run, telling me my hardware wasn't sufficient. What? A dual core machine, 4 Gigs of RAM, 256 Mb on my graphics card. That is not enough to run a silly thing as Unity on a modern day laptop?

So I am looking into Gentoo again, even though, just like another poster here, I feel I've had my fair share of bootstrapping. Ubuntu seems no longer able to satisfy me the way it used too.

I still use Ubuntu for evangelism, that is, I install it on the machines of people who bore me to death with their constant virus and spyware problems with their Windows installation. For that, it seems good enough. And if they are brave and willing to learn, I install Bodhi linux now, a slimmed down version of Ubuntu with E17 as WM.