Trim the fat, like firefox did to mozilla, just the essentials. No openoffice, gimp, etc. Personally I just use it for coding and surfing. I know it is good for avg joe to have office and graphics tools, but then give us two versions, 'basic' and 'full' editions.
>Trim the fat, like firefox did to mozilla, just the essentials. No openoffice, gimp, etc
You can easily trim away apps you don't want though can't you. I've found that popcon-largest-unused was helpful when doing that.
If it's a slim initial install I gather you can install the basics, command line only, and then use apt (I prefer aptitude) to add in all the parts you actually want.