Well that was a waste of a perfectly good night.

Windows 8 ain't great. I hope the final release is less buggy and supports 5 year old hardware.

AVLinux 5.03 went on, worked in it's own quick and minimal way, refused to update properly, complaining of broken dependencys that refused to be fixed. Not the end of the world, but less than ideal too, because some things that worked in the last version seem broken now.

openSUSE went on next, failed to detect that another OS was already installed and overwrote the bootloader for AVLinux. That also proved buggy, refusing to shut down after first boot, then also havinging issues with updating, this time yast (yet another software tool) repeatedly crashed.

There's an OS called Damn Small linux. I've discovered 2 I'm calling Damn Silly linux.

Sooooo what to do now?

Mildly tempted by a Gnome 3 build, but that's likely to be nearly as silly to use as W8 and OSX Lion, and gnome suffers lousy fonts. Presently downloading a Sabayon 8 Core CDX, which will install Gentoo and the X server, but no desktop manager. I'll then do a minimal KDE install on top of that to give me Sabayon without the stuff I don't use (and hopefully needing smaller updates, more robust etc). We'll see how it goes. Looks like I might be back on SL sooner than expected.