You've had much better luck than I.
I bought all the hype about how Linux doesn't need much in the way of resources, how it had better performance than Windows, yada, yada.
Five distros later, including a newly purchased Mandrake and a newly purchased Red Hat, I say baloney.
Before someone points out that I should have read more, I read four books on Linux, including Linux for Dummies. I also read (and printed) several Internet articles about Linux installations on the very same machine. I'm savvy enough to get the same computer triple booting DOS 6.2, Windows 95 (the OEM OS) and Windows NT, with nary a problem.
But Linux was another matter. Regardless of the brand or type of installation, performance was VERY slow. X-Windows NEVER installed successfully, which on a plain jane 1024 X 768 display is ridiculous. But running command line only (terminal) interface, I was still left highly unimpressed with the glacial performance and the silly unix convolutions and mindset.
This was on a 150 mhz Toshiba Pentium laptop. Toshibas are noted for ruggedness and compatibility.
Granted, I got disgusted after a day or so of playing with each distribution. But I think that any installation program that can handle 800 X 600 perfectly should be able to handle 1024 X 768. They couldn't.