Here are some experiences/thoughts from an ordinary 'user' who just wants a laptop on which to use office and other applications rather than any kind of developer work
1. I'd like to support the positive things said about the Sarge installer. My first Linux try was with Woody and it took me months to get X working at all. Although I'd read up in advance and knew all my hardware specs I somehow chose a 2.2 idepci kernel which I think dogged subsequent efforts including my later effort at an online upgrade to Sarge. When I tried a fresh install with a Sarge CD all went far more smoothly and I had a nice looking desktop (KDE) with very little real effort. Certainly more quickly than when I put XP on the same laptop.
2. Aptitude is wonderful. dselect under Woody was really hard to get into. With aptitude installing and managing packages is extremely easy. This gave me the confidence to bypass Tasksel at install time and build up from a fairly bare-bones text only system.
3. As Brett said in this thread already "99% of the battle is knowing where to look" and I agree. Debian is not 'hard' in itself but the documentation available online seems particularly challenging for the non-initiated. The more I learn the more I like the intuitive and accessible way the Debian system itself is laid out: but the more puzzled I get that nobody seems to have produced an entry level guide which would make working it out less of a groping in the dark experience.
4. The rise of Ubuntu has me unsure of which way to leap. On the one hand I am tempted by the idea of more up to date software than I have in Sarge. On the other I want to keep building on what I have learned about Debian. Once my confidence improves my plan was to try the approach of selectively pulling in packages from the testing/unstable repositaries. In particular I'd like the more recent versions of OO.org and Okle. Maybe someone with my low level of technical knowledge and 'user' orientation would be safer going for Ubuntu though?
5. Thanks to all contributors to this thread which is a timely one for me as I've got a new, unformatted 60G HD in my thinkpad now after the last one died. I am on the waiting list for a UEA copy of XP, which I think I need to install first, so have a few days to choose between Sarge and (K)Ubuntu. BTW, just to make the purists cringe, my plan is to put on XP then shrink the NTFS partition down and add ext3 ones for / and /home plus swap using Partition Magic.
Rob
Rob Grant Tutor in Economics School of Development Studies University of East Anglia NR4 7TJ +44(0)1603592324 r.grant@uea.ac.uk