Back home to Linspire

Having been round the houses with Linux systems I've eventually ended up back with Linspire. Recently I've tried openSuse, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Sabayon, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Xandros, Elive and Dreamlinux. With each distro there have been issues with usability and performance. Most of this stems from my laptop hardware, the awkward components being an MSI mini-pc wireless card with an RT2500 chipset, ATI video chip. There have also been struggles getting my laptop to suspend or hibernate.

Of the distros that have really captured what I want out of a linux distro these all seem to have issues:

Fedora - no wifi
Sabayon - no wifi
Mandriva - no wifi
Ubuntu - no suspend
Elive - no wifi
Dreamlinux - no wifi
PCLinuxOS - ati driver issues
Xandros - old software packages

So I burned the latest Linspire, installed it and set to work tackling the issues I was getting. And I think I've managed to sort them all. Wi-fi works perfect, ati graphics card is using the fglrx driver without issues, suspend to RAM works perfect.

In an ideal world I'd be dual booting with Slackware but Slack is somewhat lacking with the RT2500 chipset.