I think we are very fortunate that so many dedicated people are working at developing Linux. I am so glad that it exists. To me, the strategies adopted by the conglomerate which has the lion's share of the market are so ethically repugnant that it offended me to use its OS and I found its products mediocre at best. As for the other option, I did not want to get into the hardware cum software bind.

I paid to learn about Linux. I was pointed towards Mandriva as being relatively easy to install and friendly towards third party software. My teacher also pushed Gnome (partly at least, I later learned, for philosophical reasons) but I changed to KDE initially because one of its programmes did not work well on the Gnome desktop. I later discovered a couple of other very useful KDE programmes. When I later tried Gnome again, I found it to be primitive by comparison.

Unfortunately, distro versions have a short life span. You begin to discover that you cannot install new software on your old OS. I already had misgivings about Mandriva so I opted to install both Mandriva 2006 and SuSE 10 (for starters) on a new computer. I had so much trouble getting SuSE into reasonable working order that, for the time being at least, I just cannot face working at it any longer.

So, I'm still with Mandriva. Even more misgivings, though - the old problems are still there and now there are some additional ones as well. I must say, though, that it serves pretty well. I had no major problems on my old computer and have no major problems on the new one.

I tried Kubuntu. It could not get my monitor settings right (it's the only OS installer which has had that problem) and I discovered it lacks some elementary tools like Midnight Commander. I was told by enthusiasts that I should have installed Ubuntu first and added KDE. Ubuntu's makers claim it's a one-cd installation. That's rot. It's a one-cd plus internet repositories installation. I did not want to mess about like that especially because at that time I was using a dialup connection.

I'm not sure where to go next. I like the sound of Debian, Gentoo and Slackware but I get the impression that they are elitist and deliberately shrouded in mystery. Which brings me to this quote from Operator23:
Please, can we have a link to it?

Give PCLinuxOS a try. It comes with all the multimedia stuff working out of the box. It is a very easy install and uses Synaptic to keep updated. Ubuntu can be a pain to get all the multimedia stuff working.

Or Debian, with Debian you do not have to worry about new distro releases since it can be comepletely updated using Synaptic. Debian is not that difficult to install or use, granted it is missing some of the flashy GUI tools; but how hard is it to edit a text file. It has great documentation and a wonderful community of helpful people.

Thanks for the tips and the link to the command index. I also found the following: http://www.linuxcommand.org/

I've been wavering between trying Debian Etch and CentOS. The latter seems to involve less time hunting for the right command line and how to use it. I'll certainly look at pclinuxos.

I do not want to try something that's going to be too hard to get into working order - like spending hours tracking down possible solutions that do not work. I got so sick of one distro recently that I eventually gave up trying to fix things.