Hamish, > I want to use my laptop for audio > and Agnula DeMudi sounds like the way to go for that > but i've read Debian has quite a learning curve. When I was facing the same question a few weeks ago, one musician friend of mine recommended DeMuDi, and another one whole-heartedly approved. I'm new to Debian myself, but with DeMuDi the initial learning curve wasn't too bad because all the audio stuff I want is included and works right out of the box. Getting my USB audio interface to work took a little bit of tinkering, but that was a matter of configuring the audio software and didn't have anything to do with Debian per se. > I need a user-friendly computer > for other stuff, the usual things and video production, > and also because my computer-knowledge is limited. I've got both DeMuDi 1.2 and Fedora Core 3 on my laptop. I'm using DeMuDi for audio and FC3 for everything else. They share the /home partition, so that I can always easily access work I did on either side. Have you considered installing two distributions, e.g., DeMuDi and Mandrake or DeMuDi and Ubuntu? Hope this helps, Peter