No hard feelings devnullius.
Just a tips is that Raspberry PI is also a good Linux computer to a cheep cost with a few selectable Linux dialect to use. One of the most common is Raspbian but you can also run Arch, Pidora, RISC OS, Android and moor.
In Media center you can use OpenELEC and Raspbmc. I prefer to use Raspbmc because of that it seams to be the best maintained of them and was the first distribution I tryed. And it works good enough for me.
devnullius note ! if you use the NOOBS installation package and select Raspbmc you don't need a separate Linux installation in the bottom their is included a light weight Raspbian installation (without the GUI) that use Raspbmc as a GUI. You can also install a full Raspbian true NOOBS and then install a standalone package of Raspbmc to make it possible to select the feature and GUI you under current start want to use. Just to start the Raspbian GUI od Raspbmc. Ther is some guide to or this in the Raspbmc forum.
Debian and Raspbian is almost the same just different distribution.
It is not so hard to install the Raspberry PI if you just have some basic knowledge about Linux.
The simplest way to make a system up and go is to use the guide and the NOOBS installation.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloadsAfter that you are up and running with the hardware and a basic setup. Than after that you get some more work to customize all your features. And for that you have some help from the forum and so and off cause some try and error.
But as I sad you need some basic knowledge about Linux.
I was up and running within a hour in my first installation including the downloading of my Raspberry with help of this guide.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/quick-start-guide-v2_1.pdf Then it's always like I have in my sigh below.
Their is two easy way to configure a system!
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