Two weeks ago someone asked me if i could help him moving from Window$ boxes to Linux boxes on his office workstations ( they are around 10 ). Helping doing that is not a dificult thing but the problem is that I don't know what distro to use for that. On my home PC I use Slack ( in my point of view best destro ever). In the past i had experienced with RedHat (4 ,5, 6) wich nowdays I dislike it very much (because on that distros I hadn't been able to recompile my kernel but those thing does't count now).

The distro must satisfy the folowing needs (in the order of their priorities):

1. EASY TO USE (graphical enviroment aka. KDE preferably)
2. Easy to configure (preferably hardware autodetection)
3. Easy to configure & use localization suport.
4. Easy to configure & use printer (my experience with these devices is outputed trough /dev/null )
5. Installs ontop of windows $HIT (installs & runs with no-problem on a FAT32)

The last need (aka. FAT-thing) is not of shuch importance but it could help a lot.


One of my friends recomanded me to use Gentoo, but i was thinking of Fedora (but i heard that it has stability problems) or Mandrake.


Thnx, and excuse my English.

Mandrake or RedHat/Fedora - probably go with Mandrake though, RH is discontinuing desktops and Fedora may well be spotty until they get everything up and running.

Any distro can work except the installing on a FAT32 filesystem. Linux uses a filesystem far to superior to FAT. If your actually going to install Linux, use its native Filesystems. There are several I think that will install, but they're not very popular, which makes sense cause they probably are very crappy installs...

Mandrake is great! Stable easy to use productive and pleasing to the eye. Ant it comes with kde! As far as config its all gui right there for you. Mandrake would be the distro of my choice!