Ubuntu
Of the many Ubuntu releases I have tried, none have been any good.
It doesn’t look at your harddrives and run swapon for swap partitions. In fact, I tried running swapon /dev/hda2 and it gave me some error message in Japanese (because I was using the Japanese localisation). But I’m sure it said something along the lines of Ubuntu is only for popular bloggers with machines purchased in the past two years, how dare you attempt to allow your old machine to run it at a sensible speed?!
.
On top of that, its GTK2 buttons always look like they’re being broadcast on Channel 5 until you mouseover them. It’s the only distribution that I’ve ever witnessed doing that.
I may have installed Ubuntu once with one of the old installer-seperate-from-the-live-CD, but I haven’t managed to install Ubuntu (or Xubuntu) from one of the live-and-installer CDs. It always fails with some cryptic error message (or in the latest case, it crashes - presumably from lack of RAM which would be fixed with swapon - before I can finish installing).
I’ve decided that Ubuntu must only like really recent PCs and the bloggers that write their blogs on them (which is why all the bloggers love Ubuntu).
Having said all that, I keep downloading and burning Ubuntu hoping that I’ll be able to install it and actually try it.