Which Ubuntu varient is best?

[TBABill]

+1 on Lubuntu on my Acer TK57 laptop with 2GB RAM. The thing flies on Lubuntu and has none of the inherent lag with flash found in Ubuntu (9.10). It is beta, so don't expect it to be a finished OS yet, but it's got no issues on my machine other than no GUI method of doing updates (must sudo apt-get update), but not a big deal at all. Otherwise it's fairly sparse in the menus, but looks good and is fast in everything I do.

[TBABill]

I realize the question was which Ubuntu variant is best, but if someone has not tried the PCLinuxOS 2010 beta it may be worth looking at. The KDE implementation is nice (old menu style though) and the system feels about the same speed as Lubuntu, maybe just a tad slower but hardly recognizable.

Interesting thing...my Broadcom adapter in my laptop was identified and driver installed right off the bat. In NO Linux distro has that ever happened and I have tried over 30 variations. I always have to plug in to my router, update and then install the driver. It also setup my ATI video and sound works perfectly too. Web surfing is fast and smooth, even on heavy flash pages.

I'm impressed after about 5 hours of continuous use because my laptop is cooler than it has been on any other distro. I was running pretty hot and the fan kicked in and out regularly on Mint 8 and Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04. It still does, but much quieter and cooler.

If you're just looking for easy and fast maybe also consider a non-Debian distro to see how your machine reacts to it. Mine loves it, but each case is different.