I moved to Debian from slackware... and have been very satisfied with it to date... I've done all installs via apt over the network, without cd's, and from ya'll discriptions this appears to be more straightforward than actually using a cd.
My first linux install was about 4 years ago... I was in high school, and on a free weekend went to the local university library with a box of 30 floppy disks and downloaded and raw-wrote Slackwware one floppy at a time. Slackware was _very_ focused on the user following RTFM, since specific documentation and how-to's were non-existant outside of the install. When I finally tried RedHat a couple of years later I was disgusted because it wanted me to do configuration using their 'tools' vs. just editing /etc/* --- I found that I could tweak it a lot less before the whole thing broke and I finally reinstalled Slack. It seems that RedHat might be able to support sound w/out recompiling if they included a OSS license in their packaged distro. Which wouldn't supprise me... considering the ammount of deals they're cutting, OSS would be pretty basic. Anyway, since I'm at school and have the network, apt is perfect. I also like the Debian-way of having _lots_ of documentation for packages, and making sure that all the stuff that belongs in /etc... is actually there. --George