[stinos]

It's probably better than it used to be. But it just keeps on coming back to me. Like last month I downloaded a live CD of the latest Debian because I coulnd't find the one I normally use, and it didn't even want to start X. Not on an old pc with a recent graphics card, not on a new one with another recent graphics card. Not generalizing this to everything and maybe I just have bad luck but things like that are an unfortunately large part of my experience with desktop linux.

[davexunit]

I haven't used a live CD of Debian, but you should know that since Debian Squeeze, nonfree graphics drivers are not included. Perhaps that was an issue? If you want something that "just works", use a Debian derivative like Ubuntu. Debian is great and I use it on a few of my machines because I can install a minimal set of packages and build on top of it.