To cut a long story short, installing Debian Unstable from a 50Mb business card CD (http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ with the 'expert' option to install straight from the Unstable repositories) and having complete hardware detection and spot on configuration 'out of the box is very cool.

With my 800Mhz Dell laptop and terrible onboard ATI card, glxgears gives me 500fps with tiny CPU usage proving hardware acceleration is working perfectly. I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted in other distros trying to get ATI drivers to work. Just check out how many Ubuntu forum threads there are with people having the same problem.

Debian might not get all the hype and be as trendy as the Ubuntus and Fedoras of this world, but in my experience it's still a first class distribution.

it get's far far more hype than fedora and ubuntu... it's just that the hype comes from stoners and hippies who everyone else rightfully ignores ;-)

Shhhhhh you're spoiling the far out vibe I'm getting from XScreenSaver dude!