Saline installs from a live DVD, which includes a pdf manual. The installer is simple and fast; it uses Gparted to set up the hard drive, and gives you the opportunity to install media codecs and proprietary video-card drivers.

The software, from Debian Stable, includes LibreOffice, Gimp, Chromium, Pidgin, Icedove, Xchat, Parole, Rhythmbox, and Fotoxx. All worked perfectly, save that Parole had no sound in mp4 videos. I installed Gnome-player instead and that worked. Saline uses rather old-fashioned Synaptic for installing software, but it gets the job done. All the Debian repositories are set up, including the non-free.

Like any Xfce distro, this is undemanding on the computer: I loaded Chromium, Gimp, and Writer and still was using less than 200MB. As Gnome and KDE compete in pointless eye-candy, Xfce offers a traditionally efficient and unobtrusive interface. Saline compares well with the best other Xfce distros (Salix, Mint, and Vector) and offers the combination of high stability and a large repository.