I'd recommend against new users running Debian (dispite my running in at work and home) for the following reasons:
And I suggested it because knoppix on harddrive is basically a self-configured debian install.
* Unstable is unstable[1] and stable is very out of date at the moment
Sure, stuff changes if you regularly apt-get dist-upgrade, but that's not a problem if you only upgrade the packages that need upgrading..
* X configuration is horrible/non-existant
X is preconfigured quite well in a knoppix install.
* If you forget to load the module for your network card early on in the installer, it won't ask you for network configuration and you'll have to spend half an hour hunting down the required configuration files
Not a problem in a knoppix install.
* dselect lets you remove dpkg
Windows lets you delete the java debugger (teddy bear file :) or any other system file that's not in use at the time. Very few people see this as a huge problem..