Here is an advice : stick to one Linux distribution only and buy a book (paper) about it. Once you are at ease with one distribution, you are easily able to understand the differences between the other ones, and select the one that better suits your needs.

Personnaly, I began with Mandrake with the book "System Linux", O'Reilly editions , then Debian, then Knoppix, then Ubuntu, and my quest has finaly ended with Pardus.

If Pisi doesn't handle correctly large updates, it's time to make a specific bug report. The above linked bug report is closed as fixed, and it's a quite different one.

I keep it on my laptop, but the upgrade from karmic koala to lucid lynx fails.

Can you give us the link to a rar archive that fails to open correctly, please ?
Note that you can extract the content of a rar file in a terminal using the following command :

Hendrikus, I know how to use search website, but one should not have to open a web page just to understand what you are asking about. My question was meant to make you realize that.

What is "psad" ?

Meanwhile, you can erase the configuration repository (or rename it). It sometimes does the job.

Why can't you do it ?

What is "AUR" ?

You can use the Notes plasmoïd instead of Tomboy, and BasKet instead of Zim. Both are available in Pardus.

The first time wizard Kaptan allows you to activate the contrib repository.

Oh ! I read too fast and misunderstood it.

Can you say a little bit more Andreas ? What about the attendance ? the reactions ?

You have to choose nvidia as the driver in display-manager > Device > configure

amazonmp3 depends on the boost library which is not yet available on Pardus.
Once it is, it should work on Pardus.
You should ask for the creation of a pisi package for boost.