Replying to The Best Version Of Linux For Somone New?

My advice (although not for the faint of heart) is to give yourself a bit of a crash-course. Throw slack on your system and cut your teeth on it. That way, if you're not content with Slack, and choose to move to another distro, you won't be completely lost when you have to play with the command line...and you can't avoid the command line in linux..

I use Mandrake and it seems to be easy. You still can have linux and windows just pick witch one you want to run on boot. The best of both worlds.

I would add that Slackware became a Distro of year 2004 at LinuxQuestions, so this is something. Also is keeping in first 10 on DisroWatch for many, many years...

And there is very good and large repository ([Linux Packages] on which you can get all needed software, best way is to upgrade from command line, there is also command line frontend to managing packages, where are listened all istalled .tgz files, there is also Swaret and SlapGet (upgrade / net-install utilites) and graphical frontends (GTK+ and QT) for all those tools (download them separetly, not included in distro, since they are just some eye-candy)... In my opinion managing Slackware packages is easier than any other, and it uses gziped tar files, so creation of packages is also very intuitive...

But at the beginnig maybe you should try Fedora Core 3? (or even beta of 4...) Fedora has second place at Linux Questions... what would I say - there is the poll: 2004 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards, Distribution of the Year

Since there is no such thing is the best distro, therefore, I'll just suggest. The current ones are test done by me and here's my rating for being good at looking good, operating well, newcomer friendly and doesn't fall apart like Windows.

**Note, the following is if you installed it, not running ON CD**

KNOPPIX 7.0/10 (it's using DEB, which not every package is packaged in, but there
APT-GET though...)
SUSE 9.0/10 (lacks in laptop support, sometimes the battery monitor never
works)
Yoper 8/10 (lacks in auto detection, graphical installation, and support)
Fedora 8.5/10 (only from FC3 Samba is easy to configure. Else, in order to use KDE
as default you must edit its /etc/sysconfig/desktop file manually)
Mandrake 4.0/10 (full of bugs and never able to upgrade any base software until its
next release)
Gentoo 5.0/10 (hard to compile, not newcomer friendly, but very rewarding and u
can learn alot. Plus, it's very customizable)
VidaLinux 6.0/10 (based on Gentoo, its easy to install but takes forever. Takes more
than 1 hour for the installer to compile up to kernel, I never got
passed it because it took too long.)
Ark Linux 5.0/10 (Poorly reconfigured, cannot set to other init stages when boot,
frustrating)
Linspire 6.5/10 (Although its pretty good in performance and user friendly, most
free software that you can just download has to be paid by joining
their C-N-R program which means spending more than you need to)
Slackware 7.0/10 (Although never thoroughly but installation is just like FreeBSD,
finding and installing software is hard.)
FreeBSD N/A (It never got a rating because it's not Linux, therefore, I'll skip)
NetBSD N/A (It never got a rating because it's not Linux, therefore, I'll skip)
College Linux 7.0/10 (it's exactly like Slackware)

That's all folks, those are my ratings for the Linux distros.

cya around.

xboxrulz

gangsta_zar,

Try before you decide (on installing) there are many Live CDs, Operating Systems you can boot from CD without touching your hard drive. You can pretty much get any OS running off a Live CD, I remember when I created a Red Hat 9 Live CD, the guys who use to work on it, stopped at RH7. I basically just did it to learn about it, and the impressive compression they used which could make 2-3GBs of programs run off a 700MB CDR.

So get yourself a Live CD, SuSe has one, nice gui, file structure, not something I would use.

Ubuntu, has a Live CD too, never really tested it out, so can't say much about it.

Debian, well, so far this distribution has given me so much hassle, I pretty much had to configure it from ground up using only a console because it lacked so much and was far behind the other distributions when it came to their kernel.

Knoppix, is a Live CD based off of Debian, latest version was quite nice, and this disc becomes a great recovery CD.

Fedora, well what can I say, I simply can't be persuaded to switch from it, we've had so much time getting acquinted with one another from RH5 to RH9 then onto FC1 to FC3 and it's never let me down and I will be definitely getting FC4 when it's out of testing. Fedora is kind of like how Mozilla is, in terms of how it's created, basically Fedora creates an OS that Red Hat Enterprise Edition is based off, Mozilla creates a browser in which Netscape bases itself off.

Then there's Gentoo, but I wouldn't recommend it till you're very comfortable with Linux, this is probably by far one of the best you could get as everything is left up to you to configure and compile and install.

Slackware, quite close to Unix-ways, haven't tested it out lately, but it was pretty much a distribution that we could exploit easily, not very cool.

Mandrake, Based off Red Hat, it was suppose to make Linux easy for Windows users to switch over to, although I'm not sure what it's really like as I've never tried it.

My friend created a distribution, Live CD, which catered to the Average Joe, although, I don't have a link or know what name he's given it.

Then there's a lot more distributions that I have no clues about, but either way, you've got to learn Linux, don't try to get away with not learning much, like you do on Windows, they are trying for security and bugfree code, Microsoft are trying for more customers, release dates on time (or sent out buggy, fix later) and gains for their shareholders, there's a big difference in what they aim for.


MC

I suggest you to start from Knoppix... you need no installation and you are ready to learn the basics of Linux direct from the CD...
Most of the windows features are supported and you will feel at home with knoppix...

Get knoppix from
http://www.knoppix.org

get it now and know it now

I agree... for realy beginning Mandrake is good, it is easy and most menu-driven with easy instalation in many languages... but when you will look around inside, you would probably want to switch to something that is most powerfull... there are of course mentioned earlier Gentoo and Debian, but don't you forgot Slackware?? I'm Slackware user for 7 years now... I't is mature, powerfull, clasic and fast distribution that gives you large control over your system with small effort... it is also well documented over the web... I can recomend it as "second distro" - just after trying Mandrake... don't try Gentoo/Debian/Slackware too early - you can scare yourself and make worst thing - give up linux!

if u are approaching to linux i think Mandrake distro is the best, but debian is the top.

personally i love a floppy distro of linux, it's named mulinux, i'll tested it on very olds computer and i think it's a very cool version

anyone know mulinux?

When i started out on linux, i only had a 56k modem, and i downloaded Fedora core 1 and 2, slackware, and 2 different versions of knoppix.

11 CD's total !

anyways, places to buy Linux cd's....
1) best place of all.. from the distro's web site. Help the cause
2) cheapest place of all ...ebay

Buying linux is surprisingly cheap, You can usually find some kid on ebay who has a fast internet connection, and downloads and sell's linux distro's for £2 for a bit of extra pocket money.

My personal favorite is mandrake for the Newbs, that or linspire (Formerly Lindows....)

You can find mandrake here.

you can find Linspire here.


The only drawbacks to downloading is that it takes so frigging long. You are downloading a CD image that is about 675 MB, so it takes a while...

Another option is to go to a refutable computer store (MicroCenter, And sometimes BestBuy has some distros.) and buy them for very cheap....