I already nuked Win8 because it was an ugly piece of crap. My description for those who haven't used it is that somebody removed Blackberry's arm and Win7's head and grafted the stumps together with a bad ripoff of OSX and Gnome 3. I apologize if this is excessively disturbing.
It's okay to have "extra installed." The more under-the-hood extra the better. Just not a zoo of preinstalled apps. At this point, I just want something vanilla Gnome 3 that works out-of-the-box and uses generic software like Synaptic and vanilla Firefox as opposed to exclusive apps like Ubuntu SS and Ubuntu modded Firefox. The only reason I'm not using Ubuntu (which works fine with my hardware) is that I can't replace the software center without uninstalling the desktop environment metapackage. This has been driving me crazy for over six months now, so I'm prepared to wait for an answer.

Have you considered turning off the UEFI? I set everything back to legacy mode and have no problems. If you do that you'd remove one hurdle. I am not that convinced I needed UEFI anyway, especially if I was ditching windows. (I still have it on this box on a small partition due to my Zune and a couple other windows only things).

Do you have a Broadcom wireless? If your laptop has one of the dell cards like 1390 or (I think) 1510 then it probably is. If so, you will have an extra step to get the drivers.

As for installed programs, most of the major distributions do a pretty good job and do not have too much crazy stuff installed. Go for live cd's you can use to install and that will limit what could be on it.

If you compromise a little, you might want to check out Mint's Debian edition. It is Debian with a Mint front end. You would still have to chase down the broadcom wireless bits (If that is what you have ) but the rest would be there. They have a great community and good support.

It sounds like your preference is more toward a deb package system rather than rpm, is that true?

Totally agree about Windows 8. I tried it for a month. After the first week I got a mod to make it boot/look like windows 7 and then I still was annoyed. Went in last week, killed the secure boot, the uefi and blew it all away on my laptop. It is amusing to see the same interface on their windows phones and the Surface tablet... yuck...

That's funny but seriously check these links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_CD
http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Live+Medium (try them all )
http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/
or even Barnes and Noble (magazines that come with live to check out) if you don't have a fast net speed plus if you're not using windows then what we said about bios settings "considered turning off the UEFI"

I can definitely turn off the UEFI. I just thought that legacy boot mode is not really as good on computers that have UEFI. The big thing is hardware support for virtually everything out-of-the-box because I haven't got the slightest idea how to figure out what hardware is inside my laptop because there are multiple kinds of Inspiron 15R that are all different and I don't know how to find the model number.

Package system is not very important at all. The only reason I'm leaning toward .deb packaging is that when binaries are distributed by themselves, for some reason they are always in .deb form.

If not using Windows, the easiest (only?) way is to disable UEFI and enable Leagacy Mode. After doing that, I was able to load my installation disc.

If you do not want to install proprietary drivers separately, then you do not want Debian. Proprietary software is not included in the official repositories, because of a commitment to free software. Something like Mint or the several "distros" that are pre-configured Debian with proprietary software included would be better for you. Saline, Solus, Mepis, Crunchbang and a few others.

A lot of distros, including debian, support UEFI-

http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-i.../2012/20121018

When I bought my new computer, it would only load the pre-installed Windows system. It would not load the Debian disc, until I disabled UEFI. Thus the reason I always advise people to disable it.

This thread on the Slackware sub-forum has some good info about UEFI: UEFI Install. Some is Slackware specific but there is a good post that describes a good bit about UEFI.

As you can see from a few other posts in this thread, they too killed their UEFI. I have had no issues whatsoever after doing that. Linux is up and running well.

As for the drivers, it is much easier than you may think and some distributions make it easier than others. What is installed on the laptop now (I lost track through the thread)? If I were you I would go with larger distro and work from there.

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Assuming thatyou were installing from a debian .iso post 7.0 Beta3 that could have been from using a 32bit debian version, or it could have been from secure boot.

If it was secure boot, it would have worked if it was disabled. (secure boot that is, you dont need to disable UEFI)

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the serial number should be on a tag (search # plus add Dell Inspiron 15R) and if you are using 64 bit capabilities should download 64 bit OS

OP, I am like you, in the sense that I abhor OSes which come with a plethora of apps- 98% of which I will never use. I recently switched to Crunchbang- it is based on Debian (uses Deb packages, plus some of it's own)- is very minimalist...yet it just works out-of-the-box (and has all the multimedia codecs pre-installed) and uses the same installer as Debian. I absolutely LOVE it. There was nothing to pare-down -and as a largely computer-illiterate noob, ....IT JUST WORKS! My computer works better today with Crunchbang, than it ever has since the day I bought it.

The only criteria of yours which Crunchbang would not satisfy, is the fully-featured desktop. It comes with Openbox [which is great once you get used to it; and can be fully customized/be whatever you want it to be, just takes a little learning to do it]. Personally, I don't think there is an OS which will satisfy both of your criteria- as the ones that use full-featured desktops tend to also come with all the bloat- but like I said, you can make Crunchbang into whatever you want...yet all the leg-work has been done already, in that you get a fully-functional "just works" OS out-of-the-box. You'd just have to play with Openbox/Tint2/Conky [and what ever you'd care to add] to get the desktop features you want....which, in my opinion, is far more productive than having to whittle-down a big, bloated OS. And once you see the performance....you'd be amazed.

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I'm sure this isn't what you intend but your question sounds to me like "Will you please show me how to get exactly what I want out of Linux without me having to learn anything new?". Once upon a time you were a Windows (or Mac) newbie and you had to learn how to do things and tweak the system, at least the things you were allowed to tweak, to get it like you wanted it. Now you're a Linux newbie. With Linux you have an awfully lot more choices than you had with your former operating system but it isn't difficult to learn how to exercise those choices. When I started my own Linux adventure I bought a used Windows tower for $10 at a flea market (I had extra monitors, mouses and keyboards). I installed Debian on it, using a netinstall CD (which I burned myself, after spending a couple of hours learning how). It came with Gnome, which I didn't like, so I installed Xfce (with synaptic). I liked Xfce ok but tried KDE out of curiosity. I really liked KDE and that's what I've used, most of the time, ever since. My current every-day machine is running Kubuntu 12.04 but I have other machines which run Debian Wheezy, Xubuntu 12.04 and Puppy. By far the easiest way to set up a machine with a small, customized set of applications is with a Debian netinstall disk. Just install the basic system, then use the command line interface to install exactly what you want thereafter. It isn't that complicated and there are numerous tutorials, available online, which will help you get it done quickly and easily. Just remember to make your search query specific with regards to your distro and version.

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More like: Help me find a distro that I can use specifically for experimenting with the UI, that is easy to install so I can learn the stuff you're talking about in small bites, instead of in one big glom.
Actually, I have found a distro that works perfectly for now, as I decided that I am going to try a bunch of them in virtual machines. Just for right now, Fedora works pretty good, precisely because all DE's that it ships with are VERY close to Vanilla packages. I am actually looking at KDE again after hearing its development philosophy and that of GNOME, and the Maximalist philosophy when it comes to options and preferences is growing on me very fast. My needs just keep evolving; at this point they are so far from the original thread that I am wondering whether I should start another.

Edit: Here it is: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...89#post5076589

You don't need to distrohop to DE hop..Lay a base and change out DE's

Basically looking for a base to DE hop with that is both noobish enough and has vanilla DE packages. Fedora is adequate for the DE hopping in VBox, BUT. Enough of my needs for a distro have changed that I started a new thread here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...70#post5078570