and then they won't spend 10 minutes figuring out how something should be installed
Thats coz Linux is a kernel not an OS. That is why there is no standard, as there is no standard OS.
Try gentoo, you won't regret it. People harp on about debian, but gentoo wipes the floor with it.
emerge works for everything. for example "emerge -U world) upgrades everything you currently have installed including drivers.
I recommend you to download 1.4 rc3 install CD and use a stage3 tarball. It's worth printing off the install docs, as it VERY involved, and it takes quite a while. Using stage3 will speed it up considerably.
I also recommend using "-kde -qt gtk2 gnome" in your make.conf then "emerge gnome". KDE is awful IHMO. It's just a bad windows clone, for a more Amiga-like experience Gnome2.2 is very nice and responsive.
Also set your CPU and ARCH to Athlon/P4/TBird etc for better optimizations
You'll want to enable the Pre-Emptible and Real-Time kernel patches when you compile your kernel as this will speed it up no end.
"emerge nvidia-glx" if you have NVIDIA hardware
"emerge galeon-cvs" for the best browser on Linux
"emerge gaim-cvs" for MSN/AIM/ICQ messaging
"emerge ut2003-demo" just to see how good Gentoo is compared to windows on the same hardware.
Have fun!