[gnome-love] Which distro?

[news optimistic co uk]

Greetings to all fellow Gnome lovers!
I'm a bit of a newbie here-abouts, and I've just discovered Gnome 2.2.
I need a little help, however.
Here is the situation:

- I really like Gnome, especially Gnome 2.2
- I presently can only use Linux on one machine, a 500Mhz AMD with 400MB RAM.
- I have tried this machine running SuSe with KDE, it was pretty smooth.
- I dislike both SUSE and KDE strongly - especially because you have to pay for it (I am a student), and my 
version did not come with any development tools.
- I have also tried this machine with RedHat 9 + Gnome 2.2.
- This seemed to be horribly un-responsive (especially compared with Windows/SuSe)
- I thought that Debian might be a bit faster.
- I tried Debian Woody, liked its net-install feature very much but found it only came with Gnome 1.4.
- I tried Debian Sarge, but discovered that it was pretty impossible for someone like me to install. Doing a 
chroot install seemed to me like a bit of a headache.

I am now looking for a distro which will run Gnome as efficiently as possible and be reasonably easy to 
install (i.e. no self-builds, no chroot etc.).

Anyone have any bright ideas?
Love to all Gnome lovers,
-- 
Thomas K


--
Personalised email by http://another.com