Well... Fedora is probably the most developed Linux distro of most, especially as it is the underlying test bed for the commercial Red Hat distro. It is quite heavyweight through and is best for power users. Ubuntu in contrast takes a completely different focus, creating a distro that is one of the most polished and slick versions of Linux to date. It is also the only one I've used that can install from itself and doesn't need any intervention to get all of your system's hardware recognised and installed. It is completely plug and play! Debian in contrast is quite hardcore, with little to no friendliness, keeping it for the user to do all the hard work themselves to get everything to work and live in harmony.

The thing is though. Why restrict yourself to just Debian? Linux is free after all. Download and give the Live CD versions of Fedora and Ubuntu a try. Play around with them. It costs nothing more than the time to download a CD ISO, and the price of a single blank CD. And after all. What else have you to do?

Definitely keeping things retro with the 20GB HD. It would be madness for most people to even consider such a small HD. A new 40GB HD is under £17 these days and a 160GB one is only £25. Why would you need that space? Well most people create and use files on their computers, and these take up HD space.