...

But whats a near ideal replacement? Gentoo? Lindows (avoidable?).

Just like the old adage "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" the same is true for the Linux desktop i.e. you will get a lot of different opinions. You will have to decide which distro works best for you.

Ah well, It is the difference of Opinions that makes horse races.

I have decided to go for Sarge. The aim of getting a desktop friendly distro is to fulfil the Goal of becoming a WindowLess office (since everything will be Open) by migrating from Tata EX which is totally tied in to Microsoft platform, to Tally on Fedora/RH9/Debian. OpenOffice and Firefox pretty much cover the other major needs.

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