so whats the best lightweight yet fully featured debian based distro thats not ubuntun or ubuntu derived?

I'd imagine Crunchbang++.

LMDE with XFCE?
Sadly not available as a variant so is DIY:
http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

i have LMDE on that hard drive right now, not bad but im not sure how i like mint in general, it seems to be trying too hard to follow ubuntu

what about antix? im putting it on my netbook with icewm, why not use apt-get to get a more modern desktop environment for my desktop?

I prefer plain Debian myself but, as mentioned, for gaming I think things may be a bit old. I've no experience of Antix, oddly, as I keep forgetting to put it in a VM. I don't tend to trust the smaller respins though just due to their smaller teams. To clarify I mean I don't trust them not to have issues with broken dependencies and the like just due to a relatively small number of testers -- I've a lot of respect for the teams involved and I trust them as much as any open source projects to be doing the right thing.

Was a very good one blockout yes!

Mantle does seem very promising but pretty useless in the sense that if they cannot fix their drivers for linux and get them to work properly, how is that ever going to unseat directx if you cannot get their gpu to deliver the goods?

@op This is gonna be a fun project for you in the very least. It come with frustration, but you will learn lots in the process.

Have fun!!!

if im not mistaken, the dependencies for antix is the same ones for mepis which is fairly decent size.. if not using the dependencies of something like debian testing.. are these other distros not just essentially debian with a specified group of pre-selected packages anyway?

Yes, they're essentially Debian Testing (usually) with a few tweaks to make things easier and/or to try to deal with any missing packages.
That is where the problem lies though -- Debian Testing tends to just lose packages now and again and they can stay lost for months. Debian Unstable loses them too and more frequently but they re-appear a lot more quickly too. I have known Testing have missing packages for 6 months or more (I think one was 0AD, a game, so not a problem but there have been others) which was why I moved to Unstable. I've also noticed odd little issues happen in Debian Unstable then happen in Ubuntu (based upon testing) a little later on.
[The above is assuming you "apt-get dist-upgrade"]
So, to me it is easier to just use Debian unstable directly than use something based upon Debian Testing.
The above is all my opinion and my admittedly limited experience -- I just use Debian Sid day-to-day.

Argh! AntiX is 32 bit only?!? As is Steam though, so perhaps it doesn't matter. I still can't get over Steam being 32 bit but that's another topic entirely.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/anti...inal/MX-krete/

The 386 veraions are 32bit but you will find 64 bit there too

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Thanks, for some reason the site doesn't list the 64 bit versions.

so, manjaro, archlinux, antix, LMDE2, or plain debian and if that choice, testing or unstable branch?, there are usually other ways to find the necessary packages if one goes missing from the repository

When I connect it list many x64 versions. If you cannot see the x64 ones, maybe check the mirror you are using.

Not sure why you won't see them though.

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http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?tit...Page#Downloads the bottom clearly lists 64-bit as well.. though using antix on my netbook they just connect to vanilla debian repositories, so i might as well go testing or unstable for that (if i start out with testing, can i switch to unstable later?)

It has been a long time since I used debian but back then, it was easy to go stable unstable testing but it was a nightmare for me at least to revert back to stable. I would recommend to start with a clean install if you want to revert but going up the ladder is no problem.

The major issue i found is when reverting updates did not work as expected because versions were newer. At that time and still now, I am not expert enough to fix those types of issues flawlessly.