It is times like this that I feel very lucky to have two ESX hosts at work with a combined 72GB of RAM and ~8TB memory. I can load up a distro pretty quickly, and decide if it will do the job or not.

I have moved from Ubuntu to Debian on my personal VM at work, as I am not too happy with the direction that Ubuntu is going... Sorry gore... it is not slackware, but it does what I need it to do. :-P