Which Distro do YOU think is right for me?

Hello world!

I'm looking for inspiration for new distros to try. I've been using linux for a few years now but I still consider myself a noobie. I started out on the brand new Ubuntu 9.10 on a little netbook. I have a much more powerful laptop now, with an intel core i7, Radeon HD6370M (1GB) graphics, and of course 4GB of RAM. When I got it I started with Ubuntu 11.10 but I wasn't a big fan of Unity, and I took everybody's word that GNOME 3 wasn't any better. So I installed xubuntu-desktop and played around with XFCE. I absolutely loved it, however the new 12.04 LTS is coming out and I decided to find a different distro. This is mostly because of all the buzz about Cannonical's commercialist qualities but it's really nothing worth complaining about, but it's an excellent excuse to try new things!

I've used a bunch of Distros on my netbook (Mint, Joli, Chromium Flow, Archbang) but not until recently did I really have the confidence to ween myself from the Ubuntu Software Centre. I could probably live without it, but similar apps like the Mint package manager, and maybe SuSE's YaST might be right for me but I want some opinions. I'm currently using Mint 12 with GNOME 3 (the MGSE makes it much better IMO) and I tried Cinnimon but it feels laggy to me.

I'm thinking of trying KDE for the first time, with that I was considering openSuSE. However since I don't cringe at the sight of GNOME 3 like I thought I would, I might try openSuSE or Fedora with GNOME. I'm just worried the differences that are found between Ubuntu/Debian derivatives and the rest of the world will trip me up. What would you recommend?

- I'm not sure how difficult RPM is to work with
- Last time I tried openSuSE was on my netbook and I couldn't even connect to wireless
-XFCE is my favorite but GNOME 3 is ok. kaddy's videos of E17 looks SWEET though and I might try it.

THoughts?

g'dayyyy again Dielan

Man... the more distros, package managers, desktop environments you play with... the more you will find out what you like best...

you should definately give KDE a whirl... it rocks...

for me... I like archlinux because I can choose my own defaults... but maybe not the best distro for you since you still class yourself a "noobie"

man... Ubuntu 12.04 "unity" is really good... and get's released in the next couple days or so... you should give it another go now that Unity works well...
Otherwise LinuxMint 13 with the latest Cinnamon and MATE (gnome2) desktop is also rockin and will be out in the next few weeks....

But if you are dead set on a KDE... Opensuse is a good choice... not as easy as the debian/ubuntu based distros but not THAT hard to learn if you spend enough time on it and read a little... when you feel more comfortable with linux and don't mind using the terminal..... archlinux will be your best friend and you likely won't go anywhere else once you start using and learn it...

the rpm difficulties are fables... you won't notice any difference


cheers!
kaddy