Still looking for the right OS

Your answer isn't well thought out. Not all distros handle those requests equally. Plus some distros are bent for different WMs. Certainly I don't want to use Foresight if I want KDE. Is it possible? Sure, is it the best KDE experience? Is it even efficient?

As I said, if you'd read the post, the issue I had with Xandros was hardware incompatibility with the sound. Support simply said it doesn't work. No biggie, I wish Xandros well. Not all distros are equal in these respects and you're buttumption that they are isn't helpful.

Likely. It still is something I want.

Well, the installer. Even package managers can be brought into a distro, and if I have to, that's what I'll do, but finding the right distro to start with to get all these things is the problem at hand. I could just try one and get halfway into it and realize its not god for my purposes as ubuntu simply wasn't. I had hoped to see the wisdom of some who have already had experience with Linux distros and configuring them. I have and will continue to I imagine :) That's what questions like this are for.

Sad buttumption.

High praise indeed for linux.

I'll make my way there. Currently I'm playing with PHP, but when I'm done I'll either go back to play with Perl or forward to something new like LFS.

Well, Suse might be a good starter, but unlikely the one for the long haul. I haven't used the RPM style PMs from Suse or Red Hat yet so I will eventually have to give them a try. If the distros are too resource hungry, they'll be gone quick.

Slackware may eventually be it, who knows. A lot of people seem to end up there. Will Slack still have a bright future if the 'owner' moves on? Debian has a lot of future potential, and the apt-get is easy to use, but dependency hell goes on and Ubuntu soured me on more Debian in general.

Anyhow, a few people were quite informative, and to those, thank you! To the closet windows lovers just trolling bashing Linux like Dan C, its a good laugh too. As always, its an experience.