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GNewSense is an FSF-supported GNU distribution based on Ubuntu 8.04, the most recent version.
Review of gNewSense 2.0
The main difference between gNewSense and Ubuntu is that gNewSense is crippled... but it's crippled for FREEDOM.
If you primarily use the computer for writing text documents and occasionally checking e-mail, you will find nothing wrong with gNewSense. If you play commercial games, of course, you'll have ignored Linux entirely. But if you are in the 90% of us in between, you'll find multimedia to be the main problem.
MP3 doesn't work, obviously. Any sort of video encoding will also run into trouble. Web plugins are the final area of annoyance.
Comment by MB: gNewSense can read any mp3, mpeg2, xvid, wmv, etc. Even better, when attempting to read such a file the first time, it indicates you the missing packages so that you can fix the problem in two clicks. Alternatively you can install all these codecs by searching gstreamer inside Synaptic. Regarding flash contents, you should try sfwdec-mozilla instead. With it, Epiphany perfectly reads the videos from YouTube. ;-)
The default web browser is Epiphany, a preexisting GNOME Gecko implementation, and not Firefox due to branding issues. This leads to trouble when trying to do really obvious stuff on the Web like YouTube.
There's a cute, half-finished workaround: you can use the Totem video player to browse YouTube. Unfortunately, playing videos doesn't work in gNewSense.
You'll find Flashblock in the Add/Remove Programs dialog but no Flash, free software or otherwise. I went to Synaptic to install Gnash directly, only to discover that the current version of Gnash farts when playing YouTube, which I kind of expected.
GNewSense also comes bundled with Emacs, which is amusing if nothing else.
GNewSense and Gobuntu (outdated)
Gobuntu was a free branch of Ubuntu which does not seem to be actively maintained anymore.
http://blue-gnu.biz/content/what_makes_gobuntu_different_gnewsense
Gobuntu focuses on producing problem-free binary packages, whereas gNewSense eliminates problems from the source code itself, making it possible to build other distros off of gNewSense.