Advice on selection of distro
 

<<Mod Edit: removed non-relevant artifact from thread being moved.>>

Could you please suggest me a reasonable desktop Linux? I mean I expect almost everything works as expected, drivers and usual tasks at home, and has a minimum of tweaking needed.

My background goes back to the PDP-11 and ends in HP-UX & SAP-R/3. No deep *nix administration skills, but I can still go back to vi when needed (I hate it, but from time to time I have to).

The last thing I want to do when back at home is fighting agaisnt another OS. Similar dogs, different collars. Well, I do not know if I manage to express myself.

However, I am decided in the medium term to get rid of Windows X7.

Lately I tried Ubuntu, as I've seen some consumer-grade PCs sold with it. I managed to install it in a real (but old) PC and in a VirtualBox VM. Not really impressed yet, there's always something not working, but I had no time to really use it.

Thanks in advance.

Please start your own thread; this reduces the confusion that otherwise results from two questions being answered in the same thread and adds to the value of historical threads.

I've split this off, so no need for a new thread.

For beginners, I advise picking anything in the top 10 on the "hit list" at http://distrowatch.com

Chances are you will try several before settling on what you like best.

openSUSE is a good choice for a starting Linux person. It uses rpm binary packages for installing software and upgrading. It always seems to have better hardware support than Fedora 11 or 12 (which is my second choices).

I personally use mostly gentoo, but this is not a distro for the new. But still run SuSE, Fedora, CentOS, Debian, and Slackware machines.

Takes some time to learn any version of Linux.....

That pretty much sums up my past experience with Windows and Mac. (And yes, there's some truth for Linux too.....;))

Hello together,

in my opinion, for someone experienced with other Unix-Systems, Slackware would be a good advice.
Provided one has no too exotic hardware, Slackware nowadays works out of the box.

Markus