The problem with third party OS's is that an OS is very important. And takes ages to install. Now I know you can have multiple OS's. But a lot of people don't bother with third party OS's. It's not like a program where you can install it, try it, then leave it and forget about it. Changing OS is a big thing and many people don't want to do it.

THAT BEING SAID! I hope this goes well and I hope you find some programmers. Good luck!

Sounds interesting.......but i'll probably still stick to arch

BTW, welcome to omnimaga

Experience with Linux kernel 2.6

That's severely outdated, the last 2.6 kernels were nearly 2 years ago and the kernel constantly changes.

XFree86 skill would be nice

Ditto, the world has been on X.Org for many years.

Qt version 3

Ditto, Qt is now at version 5.0 (5.1 shall be released soon).

=> what base version of Debian are you using ??

what "market" is this supposed to be directed towards? it seems like the sort of people who would have heard about your distro would also, as a general rule, be capable of putting together a desktop on top of some other popular distro that does much the same thing.

ubuntu is not particularly representative of "Linux systems". that aside, though, what reason would a system administrator have for choosing your distribution over red hat, assuming he wants support for updates, or a "configure once to work exactly how he wants and then mirror across the other thousand machines" arch/debian/gentoo install? furthermore, how do you plan on providing a system with better out of the box support and better performance with such out-dated software?

Yes, we're using older versions since as rule of thumb, we've found them to be more stable than anything else. We're using an older kernel also because we can get it really small while kernels greater than 3 tend to get quite large.

We're using v 3.3, either Woody or Potato, which one doesn't come to mind right now.

It is flat out unreasonable to use anything older than Debian 6.0 (and even then, with the impending release of Debian 7.0, the two-year-old Debian 6.0 is old, and security maintenance of 5.0 will stop in the next few weeks / months). Aside from commercial distributions (basically RHEL & SLES/SLED), or their no-fee but no-support offspring (CentOS, Scientific Linux, etc.), the vast, vast majority of older distributions is not maintained because that's a significant burden. "not maintained" means that not only they're lacking in functionality developed in recent releases, but also, that they're not receiving security fixes.
Using old distro and kernel versions means that hardware support will suck.

For example, on my own computer running Ubuntu, I originally could not access any screen resolution greater than 800 by 600. I had to fix this by modifying a configuration file quite heavily. We're trying to keep the number of occurrences of this to zero.

I presume you're talking about xorg.conf, so which version of Ubuntu are you using ? It's been a while since all of the maintained Linux distros can cope without a xorg.conf file, let alone having to edit one (in the vast majority of situations).