I am thinking about switching to Linux (duh) but I really have NO idea what Distro I should use.


two 80 gig HDs
2 Gig prossecer
512 ram
Radeon 1050 video card


I surf the net, and do alot of talking to my friends over the net via MSN or skype, so I need one with great sound and VOiP capabilities, and one that can run programs that can us MSN protocols, or at least, use webMSN

I also sometime play games, but not too often anymore. The Voice chat with friends is my number one need.

I am horrible at using DOS so I hope there is a Distro that doesn't need the Terminal as much as the other ones.

I do like the windows desktop so if there was a Distro like that, it would be very nice.


The best Distro would have very little pre installed so I can make my own choices on what I like.


How hard is it to get WINE to work?


Thank you for all your help, I hope I didn't forget anything.

Ugggghhhhh, Here's a question that's never been asked before Go to distrowatch.com and pick one of the top 10.

Or he could choose from those, Ubuntu, openSuse, Mint, PCLinuxOS and/or Mandriva. I believe these are some of the easier ones for someone new to linux.

Most have a livecd, so you can see how well it works with your hardware, and they let you install from the livecd also.

...most distros (and its a GUI issue combined with a distro issue - see later) can be used with very minimal use of the the command line. There are some things that are much easier from the command line, and, in my opinion, you are doing yourself no favours if you refuse to use the command line totally.

...no accounting for taste, or lack thereof, I suppose
Either Gnome or KDE can, with a bit of work, be configured to look more or less like windows (whatever that means, given how much windows has changed over the years). Never have seen the point myself, but if that's what floats your boat...

A number of the bigger distros offer a choice of GUIs (the graphical front end), where some are specialists in one GUI or anther. This has a very big influence on the look and feel of the computing environment. The biggies are KDE and Gnome, although there are other choices. this is one of the things that you should think about when you try a live CD (or several).

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Some distros have finer granularity in deciding what gets installed (see OpenSuSE, for example, and Debian), but most beginers seem to prefer the 'just press the button and I'll do it' style. Even with these, you can usually decide to uninstall stuff that you don't want. Unlike some other OSs, install and uninstall tends to work and most distros have an installer that makes this task relatively trivial (Hint: and you should use it).

Its easy to get wine to work (i.e., install it). Not all apps work with it, though, and if there is a native Linux app that does what you want, you'd probably be better using that.