Hi, I'm new to Linux and am thinking about installing it on one of my computers. What Linux distro would you recommend that is easy to use? I was thinking of SUSE as it seems to be very popular. Dave
I say go for OpenSuSE, or Mandriva *or possibly Mandriva 64 if you have/want a 64 bit system*. I suggest downloading and trying a live distribution first, to get comfortable with the commands and structure of Linux though, as it's a lot more work than windows.
PCLinuxOS -> http://pclinuxos.com - great community -live distro/installation. Just check out their forum, give it a try and you won't even bother with anything else. Guaranteed.
Disagree about pclinux.. I'm a pretty experienced linux user, and it's not the easiest to get up and running... Live distros.. Myah or Dreamlinux.. installed.. SuSe or Kororaa (if you like learning).. Suse wins hands down... I'm pretty hardcore debian, but etch is late.
What is your reasoning about PCLOS not being friendly? I was a newbie 13 months ago and tried Suse 10 and 10.1. Suse was fine except for the broken packages when trying to install something. Then 10.1 came out and would not function at all. 10.2 seems a little better, but since they signed a contract with the devil, they are no longer on my list of top 10. I have installed PCLOS .92 and .93a on probably 25-30 machines. Ranging from AMD 2100+'s (5 years old) to the latest AMD X2 processors as well as various Intel. The ONLY issue I have had is with having to download from their repositories an Nvidia driver. You can't even watch a DVD on Suse without going out to the net and finding a third party repository. But with PCLOS everything is in the PCLOS developers repository for viewing, ripping, or recreating DVD's, AVI's, or MP3's. Suse has a 9.5/10 on hardware detection where as PCLOS was about 9/10. The best thing I found with Suse was it's detection and configuration of my touchpad. Took the xorg file from Suse and plugged it directly in to PCLOS to get it working the way it needed. With PCOS; I currently have one AMD 2100+ web/email/LAMP that has been rock solid for with an uptime of nearly 6 months. My home machine has had PCLOS .92 on for nearly a year until it was updated to .93a. .93a is still a bit out dated, but that doesn't prevent functionality at all. .94 is due out soon and it will be completely up to date. Another very good distro for newbies I would recommend and have installed on 2 laptops is "Mint Linux". Mint is a variant of Ubuntu with all the good multimedia stuff fully functional upon install. Gnome is its preferred desktop, so that is why it is installed on my notebooks. But PCLOS still beats it out slightly. Though I still consider myself a newbie, I have over 20 distributions installed on my home machine (in a VMWare Workstation) for testing. When I find one that I like, it gets installed outside the virtual machine for more testing. For the newbie: 1) PCLinuxOS 2) Mepis 3) Mint Linux
Oh. Just last Thursday I had a box of parts come in (Biostar MB (built-in sound card, video, and nic), 1 gig memory, AMD 3200+ X2, WD 40 gig hard drive, Sony DVD RW, and an Enermax case. In 1 hour I had the machine built and a complete install of PCLinuxOS .93a installed and was watching a DVD. Completely painless.
Why am I not keen on pclinux?.. That nasty package manager.. I don't want to get into a war about it.. I just don't like synaptic. It takes away chioces, and attempts to make every system the same (and that's just stupid). When they are different it breaks things. Also there are (maybe cured in the last few months) a few serious bugs in the partitioner, and a security flaw in the k3b-cdparanoia-cdda bridge. Anyway..you asked so I give my reasons..
i'll shamelessly plug Mandriva, 32-bit and the 64-bit version too, well the 2006 versions anyway, haven't had too much success with 2007 yet (32-bit or 64-bit) on various machines..
How weird, none havent sent anything here about ubuntu/kubuntu and ubuntu has been voted for most friendly linux distribution. On linux magazine. I prefer to use kubuntu my self with is basicly the ubuntu running a kde desktop. Its easy for new starters and it is also very powerful for advanced users also. It comes in debian platform so it uses apt-get to download the new updates.
And it's also the biggest security risk in the linux distro world. There are more holes patched monthly in Ubuntu alone than most distro's get over a 3 month increment. Hence most of us aren't too keen on telling folks to get it. Not to mention it's not very wireless system friendly, and has issues with a number of Asus mobo's.
If you are into Ubuntu, try Mint. It is Ubuntu with all the multimedia stuff ready to install. After installing Mint, install Automatix (search google) and it will give you all the goodies at a click of a button.
If you are into Ubuntu, try Mint. It is Ubuntu with all the multimedia stuff ready to install. After installing Mint, install Automatix (search google) and it will give you all the goodies at a click of a button.[/quote] Sounds nice but im not only using kubuntu because of the multimedia stuff, its just nice distro for me which i have been using a long time and i usually just compile the goodies from source packages. Automatix is nice tough but i dont like to use a packages from what im not sure about.
