Well, distro choice is always very much a personal matter, so you should understand that you just tossed a pretty loaded question out into cyberspace. That said, personally, I'm very much a fan of the Debian-style way of doing package management, and both Debian and Ubuntu will do x86_64 just fine. (I use Ubuntu on 32-bit systems myself - no no hardware yet.) At last check Ubuntu was running somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 packages in the repositories, so that should satisfy your package availability requirement, and started out as a desktop-focused distro, which sounds like your kind of use (although it does great things on the server end now too). If you prefer the Red Hat way of doing things, OpenSuSE seems to technically have some pretty good stuff, although I'm one of those a bit irked by Novell's deal with Microsoft. Meanwhile, Fedora is also looking quite nice these days and is worth a look if you go that route. -- Tony Yarusso http://tonyyarusso.com/