potential new Debian user

["Darren" <backdoc@crotchett.com>]

I'm looking for comments/suggestions regarding Debian on the desktop.

I'm what you might call a "fairly experienced newbie".  I currently have
installs of FreeBSD, Mandrake and Gentoo, at home.  I have been using
FreeBSD on its own box as a server while my Linux partitions share HD space
on another box with Windows.  For a variety of reasons, I'm not quite happy
with Mandrake or Gentoo.  So, I'm searching for a new distro to serve as my
primary desktop.  Because of my experiences with FreeBSD's ports and
packages and Debian's reputation as being a rock solid distro with a 1st
class packaging system, I've been thinking about trying them out on the
desktop.  I've only used FreeBSD in console mode.  So, using it on the
desktop would be a new thing entirely.  I realize that trying them both out
will ultimately be the best way to choose.  But, I'm trying to minimize the
risks associated with doing dual boot installs.

Since, I will be using it almost exclusively as a desktop, I'm most
concerned about access to current builds of my favorite packages like KDE3,
OpenOffice 1.0 & Mozilla 1.0RC2.  Of course, OO and Mozilla have pretty good
installers that come with them.  I'm happy with those and could use their
install programs.  So, I guess I'm mostly concerned about KDE3.  Another
concern is how difficult Debian might be to install as a dual boot.  Does
Debian use the traditional partition naming scheme?  Frankly, even though
I've had a considerable amount of experience switching Linux distros and
setting them up to dual boot, setting up FreeBSD to dual boot would make me
sweat.

One of the drawbacks that I've heard that about Debian's (even from a Debian
advocate) is that their packages are rather out of date.  Is that true, even
if I choose to install Woody?  Just to get a feel for the packages, I
browsed through the packages looking for KDE3.  I found a long list of KDE3
files.  Would I have to install all of those KDE3 apps individually?  Or, is
it as simple as something like apt-get KDE3?

Any comments would be appreciated.

Darren




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