Thanks for the informative reply. It all sounds a bit familiar. In particular, I've used Knoppix rather than Debian because, in my experience from 5 or so years back, Debian was a time-consuming effort that required multiple passes to install on a "new" machine, while Knoppix could be installed simply once you'd verified that it worked acceptably off the live CD. It didn't get installed often, but it was handy at times, and then missing stuff could be fetched from Debian if needed. I have one machine that's been running as a web server for about 6 years that started off that way. It's time to upgrade it and a few other machines, though, and I discovered by experience that things have changed a bit. I ordered a Knoppix7.2.0 32-bit CD from osdisk.com; it's specs included LXDE as the "desktop", but it actually runs compiz, which uses over 95% of the CPU (plus 5% for Xorg), and has a 5-20-sec delay before the effect of hitting a key or a mouse button is seen on the screen. It's unusable on several of the machines I tried it on.

Maybe I'll give Debian a try. But one question I guess I should look at is exactly which window manager package a distro actually delivers. Some of the fancier new ones might look great on the latest, fastest hardware, but they might not be quite what you want if you're installing it on some of the older hardware (e.g., "cast-off" ex-Windows machines that aren't powerful enough for the latest supported releases of Windows .

Actually, I guess one question I'd have is whether my CD has both LXDE (as advertised) and compiz. I don't really understand what either of those names stands for, whether they might both be running, or how to correctly identify the pieces of either one (except that there's a process named "compiz", which is a clue, but there's nothing spelled "LXDE" that I can see . All I really know is that my meagre experience with running a current Knoppix "live CD" is that on the (older) boxes I've tried it on, its performance is around an order of magnitude too slow to be even minimally usable. And my attempts to investigate have mostly turned up lots of similar problems reported by others.