I took a look on their forum and a lot of the messages about SIS are quite old and basically the same problems as they are with Ubuntu!. 
I have Ubuntu 12.04 and the Mate DE installed and it works fine(ish) so I will stick with that. 
PCLinuxOS Mate/LXDE and Rosa Linux work but have problems with the special function keys (FN + a key for sound, brilliance etc!).