Hey, I'm glad to hear that purrkur's the moderator. I would have voted aye, but I didn't view the thread in time. But I would have voted for him anyway.
Now as to Billl, I think you're being a bit unfair.
You tell me I downloaded more then I should have but never say a thing about what I should have done.
Firstly, if you look back through this thread and others on this very forum you'll see the names of quite a few newbie-friendly distros bandied about: Ubuntu, Mepis, Knoppix, Yoper, Fedora Core, Mandrake, Xandros. Not only that but if you'd gone to Distrowatch you'd have found a ton of information on over a hundred Linux distros and after maybe half-an-hour of reading you'd have an idea of which ones would suit your needs.
Secondly, it's not exactly our fault that you downloaded 15 CDs without knowing why! I think if you'd asked in any forum or even Googled you'd have found not only that Debian isn't a good newbie's distro, but that Debian Stable is not recent enough for desktop use. If you are going to do things like download 15 CDs of software without doing even a little research first, you don't have much right to complain about the results!
One of the earlier posts on installing Gentoo is a good example listed below
Gentoo is definitely not a newbie's distro and has absolutely no pretensions of being one. I would understand if you had a gripe that Xandros or Linspire were cryptic since they are marketed at complete Linux newcomers, but you picked the most difficult and expert-oriented major distro in existence to complain about!
Thats a typical answer you get when you do actually ask a question.
Now this is really unfair. I've posted my fair share of help requests on Linux forums and nobody has ever given me a bunch of compiler flags or anything obscure like that! Almost invariably, the instructions are easy to follow. The unofficial Ubuntu guide is a great example - it's concise, easy to follow but hard to mess up.