[LAU] OS for realtime operation

Hi everyone, after many years of studio work using the openSuse distro with the kernel-rt from Jan Engelhard it seems that he no longer continues his great work on rt kernels. Being more on the recording engineer side of things and not a Linux expert (user yes, expert no) I really fret at the thought of patching and compiling my own kernel package. I would like to hear your opinions on what distro is solid for audio work and has a reliable rt kernel. Also I would appreciate if you could explain the degree of difficulty and learning curve of the specific distro. My system: Intel i7 950 Gigabyte motherboard 6 Gb ram Rme HDSP 9652 audio interface Appreciate your answers. Moshe P.S. I tried to use Ubuntu on the same machine I use openSuse 11.2 on and got pretty bad results regarding latency and x runs on jack 2.