> FreeBSD is a great choise. Expecially if you
> plan to configure you system yourself.

> Slackware is another if you like to compile
> every thing from the source code.

Gentoo is extremely easy to update, emerge is fantastic. Actually Gentoo and FreeBSD share some concepts, but Gentoo is Linux, has much more applications and is extremely costumizable. I have tried nearly every distro, and for my desktop, Gentoo is just the best one, no comparison at all. And the installation was not so difficult, at least for me.