Tuckerfan: Debian is a great distro if you know what you’re doing. It’s like an F-1 race car: Sexy and speedy as hell, wonderfully designed inside and out, and absolute crap if you really need a Ford Focus. There have been multiple distros based on Debian, many of them focused on making it more appealing to the Focus drivers of the Linux world. Ubuntu probably leads that crowd at this point, but I don’t really know.
As for the layers: Windows works the same way, but it isn’t nearly as open about it. Linux is the kernel, the core of the entire OS that manages low-level stuff like reading files off the disk and putting bytes into the video card. Debian is a specific distro based on Linux, a collection of software that interacts with the kernel and allows humans to get something out of the package. In case you haven’t noticed, there are an assload of distros, all of which use the same Linux kernel and none of which are exactly the same as any other distro. As you have seen, the Linux kernel doesn’t say squat about how the finished OS looks or acts as far as the end-user is concerned.
“Layers” isn’t the right term, but it’s damned hard to think clearly when you’re fending off the incessant demands from the cat for attention. In the pull down menu, you had all the various apps, etc, and then you had another set of menus for Debian apps that you had to sort through. The desktop looked like when you open Nautilis.
GNOME generates its application menu from a set of files that are scattered across your hard drive (.desktop files). GNOME and KDE applications tend to provide these and therefore show up in this menu when you install them, but for other programs, it’s hit and miss. This problem is more or less the same for every distro.
However, unlike other distros, Debian provides its own application menu, called the “Debian menu,” which contains virtually all of the applications on your system, and works in all of the major window managers. Packages run a script on installation to add themselves to this menu and then update it for the various window managers that are installed, so that it is always current and desktop-independent.
In short, it’s just another feature to give you extra control and flexibility. If you don’t like it, disable it or ignore it.
But I must agree with Derleth that you might be overwhelmed if you dive into Debian itself instead of starting with a more friendly offshoot. This is why the other posters recommended Ubuntu.
Tuckerfan, rkts: Oh, well. Sorry I wasn’t more helpful, but I’ve never used Debian or Ubuntu and I didn’t know about the Debian menu. My Linux usage has focused on Red Hat, Fedora (the new Red Hat), and Slackware (another distro by and for advanced Linux geeks).
I think my next system will be a homebrew PC running a homebrew Linux system.