Quote:
...I got it up and running in only a couple of hours, and didn't destroy my current setup in the process
lol, Have to reply to that one. Obviously depends on hardware and to a certain extent on method, say, DVD versus bootable USB image
but
I have never taken more than about 20-30 minutes to install a modern distro. Maybe the
couple of hours comes from Arch's text based installer. Destroy the existing setup,
only if you let it happen. Create partitions first, install to those.
When it comes to hardware recognition I come from several years of using Mepis and now AntiX is carrying on the tradition. Last fives years using PClinuxOS and it is as good. I know this from installing for other people. Last time I installed PCLOS for myself was three years ago, rolling distro, still up-to-date.
The only distros I had problems with in recent times, were Fedora and LinuxMint and that was because of the horrible old HP laptop I was using.
Of course adding applications adds to the initial installation time and that does depend on internet connectivity. Again all the modern distros have some sort of package management. I am still using synaptic and know that for example YAST is more flexible/modern. Unfortunately Ubuntu is leading the way in dumbing down everything to Microsoft levels.
Still it is just a matter of selecting packages and hitting the start button.
So, back to earlier advice, do not pre-judge, download those ISO's, get unetbootin or similar, write to a usb memory stick and try them out.
Especially you Windows people