Best Gnome Distro?

i'm wondering if i should continue to use Fedora or not... so basically i've been thinking about possibly using another distribution but it would have to be one with very good gnome support. So your thoughts and comments about which distro has the best gnome support are more than welcome.

[stryder144]

Just out of curiosity, why do you need/want good Gnome support?

Cheers

well, with good gnome support i mean: updated packages when new versions are available, or at least using the latest version of Gnome in the latest version of the distro. I've gotten used to Gnome and i like using it, but from a developer's perspective it is still a huge piece of shit (and will continue to be so for a long time). This makes it a bitch to install manually (installing 60+ packages to get the Gnome Desktop running is not something you want to do). Therefore i want a distro to do it for me (i'm willing to pay for it, but only if they do a better job than the freely available distros), and i'm wondering which one does the best job when it comes to Gnome.

So basically it boils down to this:
1) easy way of installing/upgrading gnome
2) using the latest (as in the latest official stable release) version in their latest/recent distro version

All I know is that I might spend a few hours compiling the latest versions, but I get nicely supported GNOME packages on Gentoo and FreeBSD.

but something like Fedora with Nyquists RPM collection is good for GNOME, as well as Dropline GNOME for Slackware.

SuSE as a long history of fucking over GNOME, I recently tried fetching 9.0 from their ftp, and adding XD2, and guess what it was broken, it wouldn't even start up correctly.

Mandrake 10 is still at GNOME 2.4, and it's mainly a KDE distro so most of their work is in that department. They have already once decided to release without holding for a GNOME release, what should stop them from doing it again?

[Stuart]

Gentoo, despite the hours it takes to compile.

well my days of compiling every piece of software i used are over and aren't coming back

let me add another criteria to my list:
3) no compiling necessary

[BurntAsh]

seems like redhat/fedora is mainly a gnome distro, but i still go with my favorite distro of all time, slackware. not only does slackware give a regular stock system without using unified themes and such or what not (hope i know what im talkin about) but it also has projects like dropline which offer a faster and more polished version of gnome. slackware is top notch

[Kernel_Killer]

FreeBSD for sure. Just upgraded to GNOME 2.6, and loving what I see.

[chessforce]

[quote author=burntash link=board=7;threadid=9001;start=0#msg81447 date=1081716124]
seems like redhat/fedora is mainly a gnome distro, but i still go with my favorite distro of all time, slackware. not only does slackware give a regular stock system without using unified themes and such or what not (hope i know what im talkin about) but it also has projects like dropline which offer a faster and more polished version of gnome. slackware is top notch
[/quote]

Slackware with Dropline GNOME would be a great choice if one has a pretty decent computer. The installation and upgrading packages is very easy. Also, unlike Slack-GNOME, Dropline packages are built for i686. However, uninstalling Dropline GNOME is not easy (many, including myself, had needed to do a clean re-install of Slackware to get rid of Dropline).

[GhostDawg]

I've been using Debian Sid with Gnome 2.4 and haven't had any complaints with it so far! ;D

As always with Debian you can apt-get to keep it updated so I would say the support is fairly good.