My distro hopping

If you have read my posts before, I like to experiment with distros too. Given the problems I am facing and considering the time I have put in, it becomes intimidating to try distros.

I try to stick to KDE, but most of the "live" versions come with xfce. I then install KDE.

Of late, I found Mandriva 2009 to be one of the best "work right away" distro on my Lenovo J15 AMD64, USB wireless machine (no wired connection). Everything basic worked right away, without having to do a thing after installation. I hate the 'urpmi' thing, as I am more used to aptitude/apt-get, but geting used to it slowly. The best versions of KDE4, I would say.

OpenSUSE is worth a shot. The display works, the wirless, I am unable to get to work. I reinstalled a 32 bit version, but still could not get the wireless to work.

Arch is good once it starts working, but takes some effort to get it to work. Again, I am unable to get the wireless working. I have a feeling, as my wireless dongle vendor (Dlink DWL-G122 rev D1) does not provide a 64bit version of the driver, it is not gonna work.

The two biggest problems with most of the distros is getting wireless and the xconfig working. With nvidia, the newer distros have are getting more and more complicated IMHO. In kubuntu, there are at least 3-4 versions of nvidia-glx. In older versions, I just had to do aptitude install nvidia-glx. Now I am not sure what to use (there is legacy, new, 96, 173, 177 etc).