...and thought I'd comment on my first impressions.

(I have previously had ELX Linux PowerDesk 1.0 installed for a little while, and that's all I have to compare it to, besides Windows.)

The setup did a superb job of recognizing all of my hardware. The modem is the only thing it didn't completely set up, and it did tell me that it may require proprietary software and direct me to www.linmodems.com.

The GUI for installation was okay, but it was not as clear as the one for ELX. In particular, the partitioning portion of the installation was a bit overwhelming. ELX's interface here made it very simple and very clear what I was doing, so there was no fear of accidentally wiping out my Windows partition. With ALT, it wasn't so clear and simple. It wasn't clear whether I could click backward through installation steps, either. Overall, though, I knew what was going on, and was given additional information, when necessary, about how to accomplish each step.

The full documentation built into the system is in Russian - and only in Russian. This is less than helpful, to say the least. lol

This distro uses apt-get (with Synaptic GUI) for package management, and I absolutely hate it. It is not at all intuitive, the GUI is far more complicated-looking than seems necessary, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to install a specific package from a specific location on my system. If the package I wanted were in the repository list, it would probably be very simple, but for installing a specific file, it isn't helpful. On a related note, the system has no idea what to do with an .rpm. I much preferred this aspect of ELX, which immediately recognized an .rpm when it was selected and ran Kpackage to install it.

I can't find anything! It took me ages just to be able to find directories - any directories - on the system. The documentation obviously didn't help , but a "find files" search finally did. (The default file manager automatically takes you to a lower tier than where anything but the desktop is located.)

I haven't actually timed anything, but it seems that the desktop may be a bit slow-loading.

The installation was able to set it up so that a particular user is automatically logged in on a particular desktop (KDE, Gnome, etc.). This is especially helpful since I am the only one who uses this computer.

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ALT Linux is apparently very heavily based on Mandrake, so I am also hoping it will be easier to get help than it was for ELX (since Mandrake users can probably help with most problems).