I agree with most of the points, still the reason they change is that it is very hard to do something good from the first time. And this is true for windows also. Not to mention that each couple of years you have new concepts (I mean wifi has only been around for 10 years).

And in my experience people have trouble with networking because they still do not understand basic concepts, not that they do not know where to find the files (most question I answer are of the type "it does not work" and not "where can I find the DNS configuration").

sane distros like arch and gentoo just tell you where to put info, much like you would in windows if you were configuring for static ip; the problem is when you have to fight GUI distros to respect your manual configs - couple of years ago ubuntu's networking GUI tool would just refuse to create a static IP, and loved to reset my manual config.

If you had a small server, what linux distro would you recomend for that?
In b4 DVL

"small server" as in embedded hardware or as in home-pc ~Pentium4? or as in rented vserver?

rented vserver

ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64bits. Works really great
Unity is kinda crap but with right amount of tweaking and side prgram like additional tool bar that is really great. Only pb is I have ATI card

It's "small" then only in terms of RAM (and prob. HDD). So you really can choose whatever is the easiest for you to administer. But avoid compiling (gentoo) and distros that install all sorts of background services (Red Hat/Centos). A clean debian/ubuntu/arch installation should not take more than 50MB of RAM and 300 MB of disk space (No idea about OpenSUSE - haven't tried it in ages.). "clean" means only getty, syslog, cron, udev, ssh and ntpd are running (maybe dbus).

Then install whatever you want to run. If you are going for LAMP and are tech savvy you can use RAM-friendly and faster alternatives to apache (lighttpd / nginx + fcgi), but it will result in more configuration work, as most howtos use apache.

Use LVM from the very beginning for all partitions, or put everything on 1 partition.

debian/ubuntu are always good to use if you're not a pro-admin, because they install all software in a (mostly) secure and usable preconfigured state, and there is an insane amount of howtos/bug-reports/documentation for them.

I've never used a vserver - shouldn't there be ready-to-use one-click-install OS images from your data center?

I tried Debian testing, and found that they don't automatically install non-free firmwares and drivers which is very annoying.

I virtualized Linux Mint Debian, and it seems to have nice stuff, but Compiz Fusion and Cinnamon didn't worked.

I tried Open Suse and Fedora the live CD version and can only display themselves in 800 * 600.

and I tried Xubuntu because Ubuntu Unity is crap so is Gnome 3.

I as a user don't want to use platform specific terminal commands to fix stuff, because looking up how to is just annoying.

Still, Linux do take up less resources than Windows who take up 3 to 4 GB of RAM when no applications are opened and take up extra $50 to $400 (price include OS + extra RAM for that 3 to 4 GB) just to run some apps.

Slackware here, the oldest distribution (still kicking)..., all system configs in files, you must know what are you doing to use it, it is perfect to learn Linux and subsystems.

This distribution have a native 64b package repository, and ARM flavor too. If you like tweak you system, slackware is the ideal distro for that.

There is few sites where you can download precompiled packages for almost all (important) software, and scripts to compile thous that you cant find.

If you want a small distribution for a small service, in a small machine, this is the one.

JP