OT: "Best" Linux Distro?

Alistair MacDonald wrote: Actually, I forgot to mention that I've quite often had people recommend I try Debian over Slackware before. You still get the problem of the Gnome / KDE choice though, I suppose. Yes, exactly the same here. It's not very often I hear from people who say they liked it (or Fedora). I'm currently hacking front-end code in order to try and improve the performance of the OCR engine itself. It's giving me a headache! Yes, Slackware has various equivalents (run a 'man -k pkg' for a list). Problem is, the concept of a 'package' is fairly high-level. Say you want to be able to play x format of audio on your system. You might find there's a multimedia library package that enables you to do this - except that what you actually get is a bundle of umpteen billion library files which can play every format ever devised, 99% of which you don't ever need, and which sit there on the system doing nothing. If you go around deleting them manually, you screw up the package system that's been layered onto the OS as an afterthought. I just wish the concept of a package was more of a file-level thing, so that you end of with a system just comprising the bits you really need and use - coupled with some sort of common mechanism which can tell you when you're trying to do something from a front-end script / GUI app for which you're missing required modules / libraries / other apps of course. Possibly have the ability for the system to automatically go fetch the needed bits from the 'net too. I seem to recall that Perl has something akin to this, and that in the Windows world their media player can do it too - but having it built in system wide with a common set of APIs to manage it would be nice. cheers J.