I really love the splash screen in VL5.8 with the enlarging pinguins. That is a great job will done by VL, I've seen a lot of differnet distros loading splash and I think that one holds number 1 in my judgement.
Keep up the good work developers.

One issue I take with all distros, they take it upon themselves to rename and reoganize the menues. For example KDE has what they refer to as the "control center", that's as good a name as one could hope for since that's what it does. Yet Mepis calls it "personel settings", which is misleading because there are a number of settings in the control center which require root's password and become system wide.
So when I'm helping some friend with thier linux, which my be debian based the same as my box, or might have a KDE desktop the same as I'm using here in OpenSuse right now, And I tell him where to find such and such, it's not there because said distro has moved it, or renamed it.
I'm all for each distro having a unique look and feel. Much like each car has it's own look and feel. But they don't place the turn signal switch on the right side of the steering colume. Although they do rename the inside light. Some call it a cargo light, others call it a dome light.
That's just my pet peve. When I tell a newbie to go to the control center in KDE, only to find that his distro, (which I've never used) has renamed it something else.