Best Linux Distro for a home user 2918

Tavish Muldoon mail there

My machine's a Duron 750MHz, 768MB of RAM. Here's my approximate (from memory) parbreastion arrangement:

(root)dev-hda1 18GB ext3 filesystem, with 12GB free. I've got XFCE, GNOME, *and* KDE installed. And a ton of games.

homedev-hdb1 33GB ext3 filesystem. Has a local package tree of the .debs from 15 Debian CDs.

home-shortcircuit-data-externaldev-sda2 170GB ext3 parbreastion on external drive.

dev-sda1home-shortcircuit-data-fat32 -- 80GB fat32 parbreastion on same external disk. (Holds images of my Debian CDs, Knoppix livecd, Ubuntu LiveCD, etc...

Having all this storage space available has made me a digital packrat. But if you're lean with what you keep on disk, you can run a comfortable system on 20GB. (Like I did until the middle of last year, when I got a 40GB disk.)

It may be a pain for a newbie to install, though. Get someone you know to walk you through it the first time, and keep notes on your actions and responses. That way, if you need to try again (which may happen occasionally if you meddle before figuring out how to fix your mistakes. But then...meddling was what taught me how to fix my mistakes.), you can refer to your notes.

In the beginning, you'll want to use kpackage or synaptic. You may, if so inclined, start using apbreastude and apt-get on the command-line. (Or even dpkg.)

My current installation is the culmination of apt-get updates and apt-get dist-upgrades dating back to late 2001.