A distro odyssey – looking for the best fit, part 1

“To give you context, here’s a quick run-down of the key
factors:

“* The hardware: A generic desktop, the local store’s house
brand assembled from off-the-shelf components – Intel Core 2 Quad
CPU, 4 GB of RAM, dual 500 GB SATA drives, standard 10/100/1000
Ethernet port, generic sound chip, dual-layer DVD burner, and one
of those six-in-one media card readers inserted into a small drive
bay. The box had an NVIDIA 7100 graphics chip on board, but I
installed the NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT from my old system because I
wanted the two digital outputs to drive my pair of 1680×1050
screens.

“* The user: I think of myself as a reasonably experienced Linux
user. I’ve been building, supporting and managing Linux servers for
about six years and using it as my primary desktop for five. The
command line is my friend and I’ve worked both the RPM and DEB
sides of the package-management divide. I’ve installed minor apps
from source and hunted down obscure packages to meet special needs,
but I’ve never tried to configure X by hand or compile my own
kernel. Haven’t needed to yet. As a Linux user I don’t mind
tinkering a little but I prefer to do it on my terms — that is,
I’ll happily Google and play to figure out how to do something I
want, but I get very annoyed when something breaks and I am forced
into tinker mode to fix it. I fully expect to learn a lot from this
journey.

“* The applications: Everyone has their set of critical apps —
things that they use every day, that have to work well on a given
distro if it’s going to be workable for them. For me, that list is
fairly short:”

Complete
Story