When it comes to lightweight Linux distros, there are two key names people usually mention: Damn Small and Puppy. They're both great, but if you'd prefer a bit more polish on your desktop, the Macpup Opera remix might be just what you're looking for.

If you're an Opera fan and a Linux experimenter, this distro is a double win for you. As you'd guess from the full name, Opera (9.64) is baked in. SeaMonkey is also included, and other browsers are just a repository away. MacPup bundles additional programs for just about every common task, including apps like Transmission, Gnumeric, AbiWord, Gxine, and Xfburn.

Enlightenment e17 handles window management duties, so you can skin your desktop with any of the themes available at Get-E.org to customize your experience.

Since it's Puppy-based, you can roll-your-own distro using Remaster once you have things configured the way you want and burn your creation to a CD or write it to a USB flash drive.

Macpup runs beautifully on minimal hardware and it's an excellent distribution for older machines. Even in a VirtualBox VM running 384Mb memory, performance was solid - especially after installing to the virtual hard drive.

Do you remember our youth? The good times we had, the games we played, and that great discussion we had about what makes a window manager different from a desktop environment? Then our relationship sort of got stuck on desktop environments.

It's understandable, of course. Most new Linux users feel more comfortable with something a little heavier than a window manager like Fluxbox or WindowMaker. The interesting thing, of course, is that many new users are either consciously or unconsciously playing the field of not only distributions, but desktops.

Rest assured, KDE will not text you a hundred times a day to beg, plead or curse if you switch desktops. GNOME will not mail you a dead fish from the opposite side of the country, book rate. In this relationship, it is always okay to have a wandering eye, not only for what is out there, but for what's on the horizon.

We like Enlightenment as it stands now. It's one of our favorite window managers. It doesn't feel too foreign to the new user, but it is still extremely lightweight. If there was a spectrum with the heaviest desktop environments on the right, and the lightest window managers on the left, just right of the middle would be the venerable Xfce, and just to the left of the middle would be Enlightenment.

But as for what's on the horizon for Enlightenment? We have seen e17. Right now it's an alpha release, and we're waiting not too patiently for the coming out party. We are smitten.

Picture this: It's late at night. You've restarted your computer. The optical drive is whirring contentedly, but you have butterflies in your stomach. Tonight is the night you install Linux for the first time.

You choose your language, and then your keyboard layout. This is pretty easy, so far. A partitioner works its magic on your hard disk, either resizing your Windows partition or wiping it completely.

Suddenly you are blindsided by the question: Which default desktop environment would you like to install?

Do you know? Do you care? What in the blazes is a desktop environment, anyway? How is that different from a window manager? When is it more appropriate to use one over the other?