Well I have just Been trying out the New Mandriva One Linux Distro, burnt myself a (slightly modified) live DVD and have been surfing on it for the past hour.
I have to say the new Metisse GUI is really cool, it kicks the crap out of OSX, XGL, and Vistas Aero Glass combined.
I love the Fold effect you get on windows, and the spinning and flipping is fairly cool as well.
(not sure how practical it is, but its cool anyway)
The interface is fairly simply laid out, although I find there is not much in the menus and you have to drill down to find a lot of things (even the terminal)
The Speed is fairly decent, (even from a Live DVD) it runs almost as fast as a backtrack live CD.
Unfortunatly its to big to run inside a virtual PC on my machine but im seriously considering installing this one.
For the moment though my favourite is still backtrack (especially because of all the security tools installed)
But for your average home user looking for something a bit better than Vista this fits the bill perfectly.
Well worth the download.
http://www.mandriva.com/en/download/mandrivaone