Well..I my first distro was also Redhat, but since I have realised that it will become a commercial distro, I have been using Mandrake. It connects all best features from Linux and also make it very friendly for user. And for me it's nevermind that in some case it could be slower than for example debian or slackware. And ofc , Mandrake is distro which I can reccomend for You.

PS: Reinstalling windows could be your greatest mistake Since I've installed my first distro, I havent launched Windows...and I hope I'll never do that.

Me too, Red Hat first here and tried Mandrake at the same time. I really felt it was trying to baby me and keeping me from the real inner workings, plus the fact the file system on red hat is so different than the other versions. Fed up that my choice in Linux was making feel as if I had left windows for windows I went looking for a better version. I choose Slackware to try next and I never looked back. I know, everyone says that but its true. I found I was having to force myself to enjoy Linux with Redhat and Drake, but I just love Slack. For me is was so simple it was crazy. I really thought I was going to have a hard time making the swicth from windows to linux especially after fighting with Red Hat/Drake, but Slackware was so different. I really think the problem is Red Hat and Drake try to make it a easy transition from windows to Linux and I'm not sure there is such of a thing. They are so different, that if you try to use the same logic and skills you will end up making harder than if you just forget everything ans start from scratch.

Netizen

I really have to try slackware. I haven't heard one negative thing about it and every person who uses says the same thing. I just don't feel like reading the install docs. I've been beaten down by the Gentoo install documentation. I don't think I could stomach anymore.

Ok. I have downloaded MEPIS and Knoppix, and i am going to try it in a couple of days, and so wish me luck.

Slackware isn't hard to install. Compared to Gentoo it's a walk in the park.

And so crito is trying to confuse me. I am now again thinking whether to go for slack or mepis.....

You may want to try the Dynabolic Live CD. i think you can burn it to HD if you like it.

Go ahead. Its based on a combo of packages, of course, but he'd not release it unless it was workable. Debian's "unstable" tree is usually more stable than most distros' stable. They're paranoid about breakage, for the most part. Just check out the versions of software they offer in the stable tree, and you'll see stuff that was new to other distros a year ago. It'll be no less stable than what you're used to. The maintainer is tireless in his absolutely free support (guy's gotta be living on intravenous coffee!).

Its an awful shame that stability is the issue that people think is a stopper for most distros they haven't tried. If its a major distro, it'll be as stable as any other major one. You'll have good luck.

Remember that Mepis is a 'live cd' so you can use it from the cd for quite a while to get used to it and never write to the HD (although there is an option of storing your personal config preferences as a file on the HD so you can boot in the same way every time). Try it before you install.

I love Slackware. It is not hard to install, at all. The installer just doesn't look as good as Mandrake or SuSE's installer, but it is just as easy to use, for me anyway. The hardest thing is fdisk, and even that isn't bad. The package management is great too. Not to mention that it is so trimmed down and non-bloated. It uses about half the RAM that Mandrake and SuSE used for me.

The only possible drawback is that it just doesn't do things as automatically as some other distros do. That is not always a bad thing though. I've learned a lot about Linux by using it.

I tried many distros SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, Vector, Slackware and Gentoo.
At the moment I have RedHat and Gentoo. I'm planning to finish migrating to Gentoo in about a mount. The reason I like Gentoo is that there's no extra stuff in there that makes the system work slower, it's pretty logical with no stuff like HardDrake and portage which saves me a lot of time by sorting out deps for me. It's not hard at all to install Gentoo if you print out installation manial and read it carefully. Compiling new programs can take a while but I ussualy make so that my comp compiles them when I'm not using it.