On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 at 01:56:01PM +0000, Russell Gadd wrote:
> I am trying to decide on a distribution to use for my home PC and would
> welcome comments on the following.
> 
> My natural choice would be Debian Etch. However, although it is by no means
> the only package I want to run, a major problem is that I need to run
> Gnucash version 2.2 so as to use the data files I have set up in Windows and
> the version in Etch is only 2.0 which is incompatible. So I am looking at
> present at 3 choices:
How long is a piece of string?
I would suggest if you are most familiar with Debian then stick 
with it. Lenny isn't bad at all, I run it and it's fine, but 
stable may give you a stronger feeling of comfort. The backports 
are a good way of getting the odd new appliction into a stable 
Debian.
Round here if you run any debian you will probably find help, a 
lot of people run Debian or some flavour of Debian - Ubuntu is 
popular. However if you have a local guru who does house visits 
then pick wheat ever they run, life will be easier for both of 
you.
Finally there is lost of support on the net for the popular 
distros, Fedora/Ubuntu et al., though it's not always correct.
I'm a pragmatist, as long as you don't pick a wierd, specialised 
or dead distro, they are all pretty good thesedays. What matters 
when you are starting is the help you can get, who you know and 
what you already know. I don't believe the actual distro matters 
per se.
You already mentioned Debian/Ubuntu, both are popular round here, 
I'd say that's your solution. Debian Etch if you want to feel 
secure with no unexpected surprises, or an Ubuntu LTS if you feel 
like you like brown. Either will work fine.
-- 
Adam Trickett
Overton, HANTS, UK
Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with Windows.
    -- anon