My personal project is a cross between slackware and gentoo. If you took the stability of slackware, slack package management, added some more BSD-like configs and also made it source based by option, you have Marcus Linux. Couple this new system with an easy and intuitive graphical installer, and I think it’d be a winning combination.

FC3 was ok but I was having ongoing problems with nvidia driver, xorg, and my video card. I also am getting tired of upgrading FC every few months. I tend to customize it to the point that I have to wipe and reinstall instead of upgrading in place.

The MEPIS install was very smooth. They include qparted so I was able to easily adjust partitions on my two hard disks without loosing my save partition or my Win2000 partition. The 2004.06 rev of Simply-MEPIS is also synced with debian unstable except for the kernel. This means that after the install all you have to do is apt-get synaptic and then go to town installing from the deb repositories. There are thousands of software packages available. The first things I installed were FireFox and Thunderbird. They installed without a hitch. It is essentially an extremely easy way to install Debian. (Much, much easier then Debian itself.) The MEPIS folks also do a very good job of configuring your hardware and your multimedia programs. They also seem to have spent some of time polishing things up as the desktop, fonts, etc all look pretty good and sound and accelerated graphics worked with no fooling around.

Again I tried so hard to switch to linux with other distros and could never do it…. Suse was slooow, Red Hat had no default package manager that was usefull, Slack, Debian great for servers but come on… Mandrake won me over I am so gratefull that I get to go home and no longer boot into windows.

Also cedega for gaming is amazing

On your point of being scared by text, I am sure that many people who are new to computers would. Granted, not many of them are attempting to install Linux, but maybe some were referred by a friend and challenged to it.

As for Slackware, I am downloading the ISOs right now so that I can test it out on VMWare or on this “awesome” 233MHz laptop, which has been so abused, I am surprised it works (minus a bunch of things wrong and the screen has a lot of lines going down it on the right).

If you say that, after answering some questions about your system, Slackware runs greater than others. I would have said that for Debian, as it has specialized packages for the architectures.

Another distribution that I forgot to mention was College Linux, which is (or was, not sure if it still is) a 1CD distribution geared at college students. Simple installer with not too many options to fool around with (this isn’t neccesarily a bad thing, but it has probably changed). Gets the job done.