I have the same experiences as fatalsaint. I left fedora because it always took me ages to find where this or that file is.
But I still run debian on all my machines, laptop or fixed pc. I don't think debian is really harder than ubuntu. From xubuntu website, it's fast because it runs xfce window manager. hum.. xfce is also installable on debian and u will get the same speed.
I still haven't seen any performance by building your own distro, there is also no reason why it would be faster. You can always remove packages from debian or ubuntu or whatever.
The only way to make your own opinion is to try several, but do not stop as soon as you have a little problem, ask for help in forums. You need some time to judge the overall distro.
But if you begin by debian, you won't need to try others
ahahahh

Personally I run Fedora on all desktops, and CentOS on all servers, including my MythTV server. I'm the opposite to fatalsaint and free; I've been Red Hat for so long that I can't figure my way around anything else.

That's actually the exact problem Free and I are illustrating.

I can use Debian forever and have a neighbor friend with Gentoo or Slackware with a problem.. sit down - and be able to figure out a very high percentage of everything because they are all based around similar setups. Even being completely different distro's .. they use applications for configuration/management that can be used on each other or at least put the config files in the default locations.. and make little modifications to the defaults OF the files. (IE: You install gnome-desktop on a debian box; it'll look exactly like an Ubuntu box and almost exactly like a default gnome install on gentoo).

You branch off to the Red Hat distro's.. and they've all totally changed themselves from being nothing like even EACH OTHER.. let alone anyone else.

You go from a Fedora to a SuSE box and you'll be lost. You go from SuSE to Mandrake and you'll pull your hair out.. and these 3 all use the same RPM base. It's just downright daunting.

As I said before.. I don't think Fedora is "bad" per se.. but I prefer having things follow some sort of a standard.

I wish there was a thanks button in this part of the forums. There aren't, so:

Thanks! to ebrindle for pointing me to freeNAS! That's a very cool little project!

Many thanks to everyone for their responses, and my humble apologies for my redundancy. I'm still not the power user of Advanced Search as I should be -- especially when a thread asking the same question is barely a month old in here.

Debian(-based) is good for several reasons. It allows you to learn more about the package management. Because this is also used in Maemo you might be familiar with it already; if not, it only helps you to learn Maemo better as well. Therefore, I highly recommend at least Debian-based. One example you mention. Xubuntu, with XFce is aimed to be a lightweight. Xubuntu also uses the same package management as Debian, but Maemo is based on Debian; not *ubuntu.

Enlightenment-based distribution (or as addon) might also be a good choice because its pretty, coherent, fast, yet lightweight. However, it isn't aimed at end users who prefer to keep things simple. If you wish to be challenged and wade into things, I'd recommend Enlightement (search for easy_e17.sh this installs Enlightenment easily on any distribution). Advantage of learning Enlightenment is that because of its advantages Enlightenment has potential in embedded markets including OpenMoko. Its also used in Mamona (alternative with Maemo by InDT) and Enblet (Enlightenment Deblet).

GNOME or KDE I do not recommend because you probably don't have more than 512 MB RAM, and also wish to use the computer as server (requires resources). You might try them out, sure, but if you're not satisfied then thats wasted time on a bad experience. The computer is just a little bit too slow for these DE. If you had a 1600+ Sempron you'd do great with either one. Even a Thunderbird would run it well. But a P3/700 or AMD K7/800? I ran that many years ago, with 256 MB RAM, and it was barely usable. P3/700 MHz is my assumption? RAM is cheap. Disks too. For the love of god, make backups of your fileserver, and don't expect super I/O.

While FreeBSD's graid5 has a very good performance (respect to Arne) I must caution the reader. If you'd read the forums you'd notice there have been various issues with FreeNAS. People experienced data loss.

RAID or not, always have external, offline (preferably offsite) backups.

If your hardware is supported and you serve less than 1 TB NexentaStor is an easy and flexible OS for NAS.

One can also run Nexenta which is the full blown OS without the NAS frontend. Harder to set up (hello command line) but allows one to learn more open the Solaris kernel and Debian for it is based on Solaris + Debian.

There is also Openfiler, a Linux-based NAS solution.

I recently put Ubuntu on my system (again) and have been very happy with it. I run Sidux on the other partition, and I recommend it as a cool version of Debian. I also like Puppy Linux, though it has a more restricted scope than most Linuxes, meaning you are sort of stuck with its selection of software, whereas with Ubuntu or Debian- related Linuxes, the world is your oyster.

The easiest Ubuntu version is called Linux Mint, and you don't have to hassle to play your dvd movies, it is very easy to set up.

But as suggested above, the best way to decide is not to decide, just try various Linuxes and go the way you choose.

For more endless discussion of the merits of various Linux distros, see www.distrowatch.com and check out the comments in its weekly news, which comes out on Monday mornings.