So I have been curious about Debian, but never curious enough to get away from Fedora/redhat. I am starting to feel like redhat is MS, I decide to try
Debian. My Knoppix experience was really positive....

So I get a netinstall done, and I am here to tell you it looks like RH 7.x or something.. just pretty ugly. I did this on a pretty new laptop and an older desktop.

I was disappointerd to find a netinstall used the 2.4 kernal, and KDE 3.3, but I do not think this is why Debian/KDE looks so drab.... I hope to get the Nvidia driver (older Riva TNT 32MB card) installed tonight. But FC3 looked bright and nice... this stuff looks like it belongs in a Russian hospital....

I genuinely would like to get away from rh, or at least diversify my linux experience. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions

Debian Stable tends to have outdated packages which is no problem if you use it on a server because they are well tested and lots of bugs quashed, but if you need bleeding edge software then you may have to use Debian Testing (Not as up do date as other distros but newer than Stable) or Unstable (sid). The problem with Unstable is that not all bleeding edge packages are available and it breaks things at times because its constantly undergoing development.

Hi,
debian can look the way you want it to look, just needs to be configured
and installed correctly.
At install you need to type 'linux26' at the first bootsplash to get a 2.6
kernel, then it could look better.
do also a 'dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86' (as root) to tune in your video
settings by answering questions about monitor, video card and so on.

Then debian will look as good, run as fast (faster) than any other distro
except Vector for fastness.

cheers

Knoppix is _not_ Debian and vice versa, so take anything from Knoppix with a grain of salt when using pure Debian.
Perhaps because Redhat has always used Gnome by default and develops for it, and customizes it for themselves. Debian does no such thing - you get what the main devels put into it, no re-branding, no nothing, other than perhaps some menu items.
You're more than welcome to make things as shiny and candyish as you's like.
It used the 2.4 kernel because you didn't tell it to use anything different. There are a multitude of boot and install options available, and an Installation manual is available on Debian's website. I'd suggest you have a look at it.

KDE 3.3 was what Sarge was released with, if you want a different version, you might look into some backports.
Honestly, I think you need to learn a bit more about how Debian works before you do this though - not by any means a snark at you, but it's best to learn the basic mechanics of the system before mucking about with it ;)
As I said before, the Debian devels do no re-branding or cutomization of eye candly like Redhat does. Using proprietary hardware doesn't help the situation either.
You really should have a look at the the Debian installation and user docs on their website, they should be a great help to you.

Good luck!