When it comes to video codecs, Linux is the place to be. There are several multimedia applications available to replace Windows Media Player, such as XMMS, Xine and mplayer, RealPlayer — good for streaming music, Totem – the official music player for GNOME desktop enviroment. Its based on xine-lib or GStreamer . A video that would take all of the computing power of a P4 2.0 Ghz under Windows Media Player would barely touch the resources of a P3 500 Mhz running mplayer.[An extract of the post].

Thanks

I am not a heavy app user either. Mostly, just internet biz. Firefox id definitely my pick for browser.

Debian has 3 branches always available: Unstable, Stable, and Testing.

Unstable/Stable has nothing to do with how the machine runs, it means that packages either tend to change or tend to remain stable. Debian 4.0, “Etch”, was released last week, so Etch is now stable, and will remain so.

Over the course of time that Testing has its bugs wrung out for the next Stable release, Etch will in fact tend to get a little stale. But for people who want a system that “just works”, Debian Stable is an excellent choice. And even though it’s called “Stable”, security updates are applied constantly through its lifetime.

For those people who want to live on (almost) the bleeding edge, there is Debian Unstable. Unstable, in that as updates are made to packages by the developers, the packages in Unstable change to reflect those updates. The system is still rock-solid. I have been using Debian Unstable for my desktop machine for a decade (no joke!) and have found it to be only occasionally “interesting” as in Chinese Curse “interesting”. Far less so even at its worst than, for instance, installing XP-SP2.

While I’m certainly biased, I have tried other distributions. Debian is what I return to for stability, predictability, a _huge_ software repository of tested and proven applications, and a package system (apt) that has no equal.

What kinds of users are worried about not being up-to-date anyway? Such users are very much the kinds of people who will appreciate Unstable and already be able to deal with one or two “hand configuration” issues in a year.

This is a Windows world. My friend and I are working to introduce open source software to people. I usually start them off with Open Office because they may not have the funds to buy MS Office. From there we move to FoxIt, Gimp, etc. I think if you can get them comfortable with the software, the move to changing the OS isn’t far behind.