Harvey Kelly wrote:
[SNIP] Please, for your own sake, go to Linux Mint's site, grab an iso and try that installation. 99% of hardware is fully supported with Mint - at least try that. If something goes wrong then tell us the specifics. http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
As a long time computer _user_ moving from Windows to *nix, I would recommend carrying that advice one step further.
I downloaded as many LiveCD's as I had time for. They were based on several distros and came with a variety of desktop environments. It demonstrated the breadth of what can be done. Debian seems to be the best fit to ME. I've not settled on a desktop environment yet. My investigation show I may not be looking for a DE per se but a windows manager. If I had not expermented with multiple flavors, I would have ended up with a very poor impression of *nix in general.