That's a very extensive post you have there, and it provides on the mark info on a lot of stuff!
This is definately worthy of a sticky!
My personal notes:
If you want a windows replacement, use:
- Mandrake (preferred)
- SuSe (not free, as in: it costs money) (my current desktop machine)
- Fedora
If you want to "learn" linux, you could (in addition to Mandrake, etc) start with:
- Gentoo (my personal favorite, I got 2 servers running this)
- Slackware
(side note: these last two are also better for resource-poor systems that will serve as file-sharing, media-playing, firewalling or web-serving fire-and-forget machines.)
The first list will neatly set you up with a working desktop environment and a pre-selection of packages that you'll most likely use. Not asking too many questions, and giving decent advice at choke points. On the other hand they do not challenge you to look for better alternatives, try stuff out and generally 'learn' linux. If you want to learn linux, you'll actively need to break the polish of those systems.
The second list will ask more of you in terms of technical questions/descisions but in the process it will teach you a lot about how linux and you computer works.
The second list will also force you to decide for yourself which programs you want, which is good (as you can have it exactly how you want it) , but also bad (as you will need to know what you want
).
Note: while I say that Gentoo and Slackware are better for resource-lean machines, the other distro's are very capable of handling the same tasks. They are however not directed towards those use(r)s, while Gentoo and Slackware are.
Edited for formatting