How many installation discs does Linspire use? Not being a "power user," I usually prefer the distributions that can cram themselves onto one disk. I heard that the latest SUSE requires six discs; if so, I think that's ridiculous.

Six discs are not ridiculous. They are providing a good distro along with lots of documentation. Ridiculous thing is that without knowing about the features SuSE is providing you, you are making comment on that.

It has a lovely GUI.

If size does matter for you then why don't you go for "Damn small linux". Its merely 50 Mb.

regards

Linspire comes on 1 disc, this is mainly because it comes with the most used software and only 1 program of it's kind (by default) so you don't have 3 webbrowsers installed like some other distro's do.

Well you have the right to have that opinion, but the more discs the more software. Debian Woody came on 7 discs and that was a few years ago already. The newly released Sarge version of Debian comes on 14 discs (but you don't need al 14 discs to install a basic Debian, but those 14 discs just contain ALL software that's also available through APT, so you can install everything you want from the CD's without needing a network connection).

I would try Damn Small Linux, but Knoppix fits on one disc and does everything I need. Knoppix forever.

And I don't have anything negative to say about Debian. I tried it once, and don't recall having any problem with it. I can't remember which version I tried, but I'm sure it had fewer than seven discs.

FYI, I am about as aware as possible of SUSE's features for someone who hasn't tried it. I did some research on five major distributions for a school assignment, and concluded that SUSE had the edge over RHEL (more user satisfaction), Debian (more user friendliness), Ubuntu (older and better established), and Mandriva (mainly because, according to Distrowatch, Mandrakesoft is in terrible shape and may not survive that much longer).

As I said you don't need all 14 disc to install Sarge and you didn't need all 7 discs to install Woody.

Most people will use the netinstaller anyways so you only need 4 Floppies or 1 CD (and the netinstaller also fits on those small 120MB CD's) and they even have a buisiness-card CD ISO for on those realy small businesscard CD's.

If you were to install Debian from CD you would be set with the first 2 or 3 CD's.

I think Potato once came on 2 CD's and another 1 or 2 with the sourcecode.

Debian Potato?? What does the Debian Project do--assign random words as names?

Nope, they use caracters from "Toy Story"
they had Rex, Buzz, Bo,Hamm, Potato, Woody and now Sarge as stable releases. The next stable one will be Etch (Etch is now Testing) and the Unstable one will always be called "SID" after the kid who wanted to break all the toys.

you can find more about it Here in the WikiPedia.

Linspire comes on 1 CD they also do a live version which you can use to see if everything works before using the install CD of linspire
linspire, by far, is the easiest distro that i & my family have used ...