My vote is for Slackware, but it's conditional... currently the default kernel in Slackware 9.1 is the 2.4.22 kernel.
Don't get me wrong here now... there's nothing wrong with the 2.4.22 kernel. It's stable, and it supports a very wide array of hardware and services.
However, I found it lacking on a few things (like wireless support, and ACPI, and a few other things), so I upgraded my laptop's Slackware installation to the 2.6.5 kernel.
And am running into a lot of problems. Part of the problem is the fact that this is the first time I've ever messed with switching kernels on a Linux machine.
Well, I got through that (after recompiling like four or five times
). But the other part of the problem is the fact that I'm a real newbie when it comes to dealing with Linux and how it interfaces with hardware.
I can't get my USB ports to work correctly, and I'm having sound problems (which 2.6.5 is supposed to fix, but since I don't know what I'm doing, I'm having a hard time getting things working correctly).
Ultimately though, my 2.6.5 problems stem from my own lack of knowledge rather than from the kernel itself. Dr. Torvalds has his signoff on it, so as far as I'm concerned, that's good enough for me!
So, in short, my advice to you for distros is Slackware.
But wait for Slackware 9.2. It will have the newest kernel and save you some trouble, believe me.
Slack is the most Unix-like of Linux distros, and is one of the oldest. In my opinion, it's the easiest to work with... it uses something far superior to the RPM system to manage dependencies and application installations -- but it can use RPMs to build its packages, so software availability is no different. If you can find an RPM for it, you can install it on Slackware. Plus it seems to be the fastest distro I've tried (I've run Red Hat 7.2 and Mandrake 9.1 also) and by far the most stable.
Among most Linux heads I've dealt with online (particularly at real knowledge bases like
Linux Questions), the phrase of the decade is "Once you go Slack, you never go back".
Installation is easy. Configuration is painless, maintenance is simple. Documentation is plentiful. Life is good.
Out of the box the next version of Slackware with a newer kernel will be able to handle your sound and video without a problem, as long as you're not using something really weird, obscure, and proprietary -- and even then you'd be surprised at how well things can work out of the box.
On my Toshiba Satellite, my initial installation of Slackware worked
perfectly with no tweaking... video, sound, network, you name it. The only thing that didn't work was my wireless card, and that's why I was attempting to upgrade my kernel (and made a bloody mess of).
That's more than I can say for Windows 2000, which required hand holding to identify my modem, network card, video card, sound card, you name it, Windows had a problem with it.
Slack pretty much worked right away, with no special drivers, no tricky configuration tweaking, nothing.
That's also better than any other distro I've tried on other machines. Needless to say, I'm a big fan of Slackware. I probably should have been using it to begin with instead of wasting my time with Red Hat and Mandrake.
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