Dear God

I have a realtime OS course this term, so I thought it would be wise to finally get around to putting linux on my rackmount server.  Now, on going to linux.org to find an appropriate distribution, I am rather afraid.

There are, according to linux.org, 286 distributions which are in English, run on intel processors and are still being maintained.  Narrowing my search to "Mainstream" distributions, I get only 90 results.  Of those 90, I recognize the following:

Debian
Gentoo
Mandriva
Red Hat Enterprise
Slackware
Suse
TurboLinux
Xandros
Knoppix
Linspire
Fedora
Ubuntu


Notably that list contains distributions which are clearly offshoots of those, such as GenThree, and Gnoppix.
Already this makes me groan, as I know that all of these distributions are probably nearly the same thing.  If anyone is listening to me, please, please stop balkanizing your operating system.  If you are wondering why Linux has not taken over the world, let me tell you, this is why, if for nothing else.  Half of these seem to be modified versions of debian.

Not to mention that you also have the choice of three different interfaces (X Windows, Gnome, and KDE) for half of these things.  There is such a thing as being too flexible.

So, I am putting out a request to someone who knows more about this than I do (and that person will probably be Reed), I need to be able to code on this thing, and I also want the following software:

Office Suite - OpenOffice
MSN Client - GAIM
Photo Editor - GIMP
Browser - Firefox
Email - Thunderbird
C/C++ IDE - Eclipse (Grumble Grumble)

Oh, and this is a Pentium 3 machine with a 20 Gig HD, so take it easy on the poor thing.

In closing.  Linux will never take over the world before the GOOG does, so suck it up boys, go play with yourselves in your basements.