Well my Home System is not quite old. Its a AMD 4400 with 2 GB of Ram and a 8600 GT display card. Are there like tons of downloads to get this upto date and functional. Is there a 64 bit version also?
If you want to get Ubuntu or SuSE up-to-date you will have to download in "tons", whatever that means. Around 200-300 MB maybe. That's why I (try to) release these as a single package in the beginning of every month. This will enable you to deploy among multiple systems or share with friends without having to download again and again. Am currently doing this for
Ubuntu here and will be posting shortly for OpenSuSE 11.0 (I just installed it today).
Since the release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron I have already downloaded more than 400 MB of updates (so this is like in a month). This is required if you
really want to keep every component of your system up-to-date. Else just download what I release every month.
As for applications/packages, there is no dearth of them in SuSE or Ubuntu. I am not biased towards these two distros
but my experience with others hasn't been too good.