My priorities are stability, security, and hardware compatibility. The package would have to be fairly recent to accommodate my VGA, which is a Radeon 7500 I picked up on a lark.

If you have experience with Linux, please tell me which flavor you would recommend, and why. I would especially appreciate opinions from Linux gurus with experience of more than one flavor.

Red Hat is a good default distro. It just works, and as of Red Hat 7, it's secure out of the box (namely, all incoming TCP connections are disabled, and then you re-enable anything you need if you want to run your own web server). Red Hat is good for minimizing the time you spend fussing with your installation.

I don't know how good the hardware compatibility is compared to Mandrake or Debian. Red Hat has a hardware compatibility list here:

http://hardware.redhat.com

It's cheaper than Red Hat.

That is all.

Why? Because that's what I started with and because I've grown used to it. It's as familiar to me as my favorite jacket.

However, RH comes with i386 binary rpms .. which means you may not get the most out of your hardware unless you recompile everything from src rpms.

easier to install
far easier
comes with a ton of ppc rpms on extra cds

RedHat seems to come with the most GPL'd software of any corprate distro (that I've seen), and is my favorite by far.

Lindows has some exciting things going on, but it really is designed for desktops and you'd have to find and download the server side stuff you need seperatly. Although if your not willing to let go of MS Office, it's a good place to start.

I've not played with Debaine much, but I hear good things... The problem with Debaine (at least for me) is that I have trouble finding a book or box version of it, and I don't have the connection to Download a larg distro.

Slackware is nice and slim... I haven't played with it for quite some time, but when I did it was too slim to do a lot of the things I was looking for.