I hope you stick around. I read a few of your posts on Xbian, and at some point that experience would be useful here.
At least you have Raspbian under your belt. I started out with Berkely, and got here via Solaris/Sparc, another BSD, Debian, Ubuntu, and now Arch... and I still don't know what I am doing half the time. (and to think I was actually looking forward to Arch, b/c I thought it was closer to plain vanilla than Ubuntu! (...feel free to laugh now).