+1 for fedora here. Really very stable, "just works" experience. I have had nothing but trouble with Debian and its derivatives on my machine. In a VM they're

+1 for fedora here. Really very stable, "just works" experience. I have had nothing but trouble with Debian and its derivatives on my machine. In a VM they're fine, but on bare hardware they are a pure nightmare of dysfunction. Fedora was the first linux OS I was able to get going on my PC out of the box. Arch is good too - i hear a lot for that. I might look into that for a VM, but i'd lean more towards something like Fedora for the hardware, so you don't need to muck around to get the basics going. YMMV though, hardware can make/break a distro.