I have been a Debian user since the days of Woody (2002). Debian is what I learned Linux and the CLI on. In the early days, I found myself spending a lot of time here http://forums.debian.net/index.php, asking questions and searching for solutions. The Mods there are Debian experts and will always have an answer even for the most noobish questions.
I still wouldn't call myself an expert in Linux though, because, as distro's go, Debian has been so stable over the years I haven’t had the opportunity or need, to fix many problems. Like you, I would rate myself an intermediate user. I have been using Testing on my laptop for the last 2.5 years and have no problems since I loaded it. Haven’t tried Gnome 3 yet so I really can't give an opinion on that yet. Need to repartition the hard drive to give more space to root and less to windows so I can try out the new versions of Gnome, KDE, and XFCE. I never should have gone with the defaults when I first partitioned the drive, but I was in a hurry at the time.
I run Squeeze on my old desktop since I repartitioned, reloaded and added a wifi card last year. That was probably the fastest and most painless install I have ever done. It helps to keep notes on past problems and a copy of your sources.list to make getting back to where you were easier.
My Grand daughter would rather use the Linux machine over the XP machine even though it has a slower processor and less memory because it runs faster.
It might be time to dump XP and install Debian on that old Dell system.
I would recommend Debian to new Linux users simply because of it's stability and the amount of information available in the forums and at Debian.org regarding installation, operation and tweaking the system to suit your taste. The learning curve may seem steep at first but with a little reading it flattens out pretty quick.
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