Hey guys, lurked around here for a bit and I think I might be ready to take a full headed plunge into the world of Linux. I had tried before but it was mostly half-assedly and more or less abandoned my ambitions. This time is for real. I hope. But there are still a number of issues and demons I need to purge before I can fully get started I think. That and I need a beginner OS so bear with me .

Let me start I guess by saying that I've been a Windows user for all my life. Throughout my time using it, I've accumulated a more solid understanding and ways of keeping my computer thoroughly clean as possible. Windows XP to be specific. Knowing that there are many shortcomings and deficiencies in this particular OS, I knew that I had to patch them up. And I learned this many times over as my knowledge increased with each infection or puzzle as to why my computer was running slower. I knew to keep installations of programs to a minimum, defrag often, and to keep a anti-virus (Thanks avast!) program up. I also realized that I needed a third party firewall (Zonealarm) to keep track of anything going a muck with any of my programs. And despite all these tools, I realized I needed, yet still, a malware (malwarebytes) remover. But of course, this still isn't enough. I needed to clean out and update the registry of my computer regularly with CCleaner and run hijackthis and post logs to make sure my computer wasn't totally freaking out on me.

Sadly, this still isn't quite there yet. I switched my internet browser over to Firefox and downloaded a plethora of extension add-ons (noscript, betterprivacy, adblock, flashblock etc.) to make it so I wouldn't catch something.

And quite frankly, I'm starting to get tired of this routine. I need a breathe of fresh air off of something else. And a newer version of Windows isn't what I'm looking for. I want to use Linux. I really do. But the security vulnerabilities of XP has left me quite paranoid of the internet at large and to use a Linux OS in the nude leaves me quite horrified at the potential prospect of it. Another issue I have is that while the XP OS tends to come quite bloated off the boat, they're not difficult to purge and relatively easy to remove. Having downloaded countless distros to see if they could cure my addiction to XP, I've found far too many of them that are cluttered with things I simply do not want or need. The problem with that is I often do not know how to remove them without totally screwing myself over and wondering why certain programs won't run ("because a dependency of a dependency of a dependency was removed that you didn't update properly you idiot") and attempting to go the other direction of compiling a program from the ground up is simply too confusing and time consuming in the process. Trying to get Debian 4.0 to utilize ndiswrapper for example was quite a week long adventure of hopelessly googling and lurking (unsuccessfully) for answers on the forums. Another would be not being able to figure out why openSUSE wouldn't let my computer wake up from suspend/hibernate.

So it comes to this. I turn to you friends, experts, and gurus. Does anyone have any suggestions for a relatively lightweight, bloatfree, yet, simple enough to use Linux distro? I'm basically looking for something that runs smoothly like XP I suppose, just without the additional burdens of keeping it safe. I want it to just work. I'm not afraid to learn but when GRUB refuses to properly load for the 4th time, I'm tempted to throw the computer out the window. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Any thoughts or suggestions would be great!

1.6mhz, 2gb RAM, 40 GB HD.

Every distro in the top 10 at
http://distrowatch.com/
should work

Have a look here:

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/how-...t-linux-distro

Could you repeat the question??....
Seriously, many of us are not going to follow a long post like that...

Some points:

1. Many distros now come with versions specifically for netbooks (I'm just guessing that's what you have---based on the specs.

2. Switching distros to solve problems is usually not a good idea---If you use something in the top 10 at distrowatch, there is normally a solution within that distro.

3. To get help here, it's best to ask one question at a time---In this case, I guess "what distro to try" is the main question.

4. I have been running Linux at home and at work for something like 7 years and have yet to get any kind of virus or malware---and I have never installed any kind of anti-virus, etc.

5. Failing to come out of suspend/hibernate can be a function of the video card/driver. (It was a SUSE rep. who pointed this out to me.)

---Good Luck!!

1 members found this post helpful.

pixellany, you are absolutely correct, actually I didn't his whole post as I didn't have patience for all that text, all I read was the thread title, and thereby I gave him the link

It would be better for him if he could list out the main points rather than posting something long which most of the people are not going to read !!

Haha okay.

Tl;dr.

Something which is simple, lightweight, mostly works, and user friendly.

Also needed help alleviating my fears from totally locking myself with safeguards like I have for Windows XP, my current OS of choice. It's for an older laptop.

1 Ubuntu
2 Fedora
3 Mint
4 openSUSE
5 Mandriva
6 Debian
7 Arch
8 Sabayon
9 Puppy
10 PCLinuxOS

All the top 5 I have tried before, but they were seriously huge. Way too big and ended up lagging my poor laptop to oblivion. It simply wasn't very fluid at all, as if I were running Vista. Attempting to remove said bloat only caused trouble as things started to clash amongst themselves over missing dependencies or not updated dependencies.

6,7 were seriously difficult to try for a newbie such as myself to compile much, if anything at all. After spending a week or so trying to get it to work, I gave up on them.

Haven't tried 8 but have tried 9, which wasn't so bad but was rather difficult to configure to my liking.

And 10, was probably my favorite but it had issues with my hardware .

So is that about it? I'm sorta stuck with the top ten then?