I think you should take a look at Mepis. I've used just about all of those distros since 1998 (SuSE 5.3 / kernel 2.0.36 was my first distro), but have stuck with Mepis for the last several years. I use it at home and at work. My secretaries over the years have all picked it up quite easily and it meets all of our production needs.

Damn small linux is dead though until someone chooses to continue development. So for 2009 it probably shouldn't be in the top ten especially since they haven't had a release this year. Like someone else said maybe puppy would be a better choice. But overall I guess it is still a good distro and may deserve that spot.
Personally I like arch more than Gentoo but that might be because of my laziness.
Another distro which I think is developed by the dsl developer is tinycore. For 2009 it seems like an awesome new distro.

"gNewSense contains only free software. It's also the distro that Stallman himself uses--how can you beat that?"

Those are two good reasons not to use it. Until free software works on my hardware and actually allows me to do what I need it to do it's a no go on my computers. I have listened to RMS and I personally disagree with 1/2 of what he says. So, no thanks. I'll pass on this one.

How come that Hannah Montana Linux did not make it to the list???

My daughter loves that disto!

http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/Site/Home.html

@esavard

OMG, I can't let my daughter see that.

Personally I've never been a *buntu fan. I've tried a lot of distributions out as I'm sure many of you out there have...

I've tried Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Knoppix, Puppy, DSL, TinyCore, Gentoo (and probably a couple more). You could say I like to experiment.

My favourite at the moment is Puppy Linux. It has taken me a while to realise this but for home use I don't need anything that Puppy can't give me.

At home I tend to surf the web and write the odd document. Puppy serves this purpose well and as I use Google Docs for writing letters I don't really need OpenOffice. I never do much more challenging than writing letters or budgeting at home.

I am a programmer by trade and so I use OpenSuse when I want to do any development. It fits in nicely as an operating system where you can do general stuff and also that little bit of techie stuff.

Recently I have been following the linux from scratch guide and I am working my way through creating my own distro for personal use which is simply a web browser with all my drivers detected as to be honest that is all I need day to day.

Puppy currently loads in under 30 seconds which is good but I've set myself the challenge to beat that. Tinycore can beat it but I get the feeling that by the time I have added the drivers and software to get online sufficiently puppy will outpace tinycore.

My wife uses vista on her PC and I had to rebuild it last night due to a fake virus scanner and multiple viruses. Took 4 hours to rebuild back to the previous state by the time all the updates were applied and virus scanner was installed etc. I can download the latest version of puppy in about 10 minutes and it is done.

Why would anyone use windows? I guess Microsoft's problem is that they don't release latest versions as one installable package like you get with linux distros so you have to go through the rigmarole of installing the operating system, service packs and then patches. Yikes

I totally agree with sourceview
Stallman has got nothing to do with whether a distribution is good or bad.

I don't understand why so many choices based on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is really no big deal, and you need Mint to finish the job! If Ubuntu is so good, why don't they give Mint their blessing then? It makes Ubuntu accessible to everyone, and configures more stuff for you, why fight it? This exposes an underlying problem in this community: the attitude that users should just learn as they did - after all Linux isn't Windoze... and then they wonder why Linux doesn't get more maket share. Helloo!

Depending on who you talk to, it's what they use on their PC that would get their recommendation as the best distro.

When you write an article like this, you should write it for 95% of the crowd.

1. Those who would like to give Windoze a final Adieu... your average users... that means, people who expect an out of the box experience.
2. Then, if you want to get into academic discussions on what is best as a server, write an article for the 5 top Linux distros for the server.
3. As for the programmers, hackers, geeks... hey, you're not going to change their mind, they're already busy telling anyone who will read (or listen, like the girl behind the coffee shop counter) that their opinion and distro is the holy grail of Linux... so why even bother!

Oh, and by the way, it's not just about the distributions... but also the community experience behind it.... how easy it is to get answers, whether a forum is all about it's moderator's pride and ego or about fixing things... and the development team's enthusiasm or reluctance on implementing a bug fix or driver fix right away when it's simple instead of waiting for the next distro - it's no fun for an end user to be told to start writing scripts or recompiling kernels, and it's no fun either to have to to start your search over again every year because this year's release has a glitch with something that should work (ie: webcam for example), and the other distro has a glitch with something else (your cam works but their WPA is defective).