Fuduntu is an independent distribution (not Fedora-based, as stated above) aimed at the home user, with particular attention paid to power saving on laptops. It’s rolling release, but not bleeding edge. The minimum requirements are 384MB of RAM, 5GB of HD space, and a 1GHz processor.

The installer is Red Hat’s Anaconda: simple to use and allowing encryption, provided /boot and /home are on separate partitions. It works by expanding a squashed filing system, so the root partition must be ext4.

The desktop is Gnome 2. This will be getting any necessary bug-fixes from Red Hat for the rest of the decade, so there’s no hurry to pick a replacement: Gnome 3 is not a candidate! It defaults to using Compiz without checking that your computer can handle it, although most home PCs can. Mine can’t, but it was easy to switch to Metacity. The awm dock is also present.

Only Chromium, Pidgin, Shotwell, Banshee, and VLC are installed; the menu gives you Google mail and Google docs for email and word-processing. All, except for Shotwell, ran from the CLI without leaving warnings, as did the software I added (Wine, LibreOffice, Opera, and Fontforge). Media codecs are present and all formats played. The flash plugin won’t work if you have a 32-bit AMD processor: you’ll need to replace version 11.2 with 10.3.

The programs in the repository are not yet labeled to enable package-kit to list them by category, so until someone volunteers to do it, the wiki has a classified list. Although the selection is small by Debian standards, it has something for most purposes: e.g. Gimp, Inkscape, and Scribus; Gnucash; Thunderbird and Evolution; Gwibber; LibreOffice and Gnome office; several audio and video editors; some games and games-machine emulators.

Configuration tools are excellent: I could enable my USB speakers with three clicks, where Ubuntu would require me to edit an undocumented configuration file.