Debian, which held out so much promise, has rather fallen down. I downloaded ISOs. (Oh, you should instead download debian-installer. It is much cooler, but only alpha.) I booted from the CD, and was asked a series of cryptic questions with non-obvious options. After going through that process, it put me back at the beginning of the process, giving me the same options. What do I do now?
Now, I'm sure that if I had a Debian guru here with me, this install would have gone smoothly, but my point is sort of that I should not need to have a distribution-specific guru in order to do an installation.
So, Debian lost out this time.
You know, I have some freebsd CDs somewhere ...