LinuxQuestions.org - BEST, most SIMPLE Distro for noob web/game/file servers

Hi everyone,

First of all, I just want to say web sites like these are great! I would much rather run my computer off advice from "regular" people rather than just biting off whatever the corporate lines want me to chew...

Having said that, I would like to set up a server in my home to run apache, a game server for counterstrike once in a while, and a fileserver for my home network. I have already installed and played with Suse, Kubuntu, and Fedora, and they are all great but my only complaint is that they either just want to give me the program and let me configure it, or they want to configure everything for me and then make me go into each little thing and play with it. (Yes yes I know this is a very noob-ish complaint :p.)

What I would like is a distro with an intuitive installation interface that is smart enough to know what to ask me to get these features up and running. The alternative is a distro that is as bare bones as possible and wont install about a million little daemons that it thinks I need but that I have no clue waht they do... I'd rather just get a basic, insecure server set up and running and then add features myself...

I've heard good things about slackware for learning linux so I'm thinking of trying that now. I will probably switch back over to one of the more "complex" distros once I have gotten my feet wet but for now, I just want something simple. Sorry this has been so long but any advice would be great! Thanks!

JW