Hey guys, I've decided I want to give Linux another chance, I believe I've used it a couple of times but didn't not really get it at the time. I consider my knowledge of computers fairly intermediate. Not breaking into advance but I do certainly know my way around the pc, being a 17 year old I understand that I might have no clue how far intermediate might be. I can pick up things quite quickly computer based, although haven't really found the interest to dabble with coding.

Now I've really decided to try out linux simply because I'm just bored of the windows os (vista and xp are almost identical, just vista feels like open and bit more streamlined) it feels like I've explored all of it and there is nothing new and fun to customize, muck around with. I love getting apps and making my desktop look different from the crowd, simply as it's something nice looking and interesting to do.

There is a bit of a problem, I'm an advent gamer. Obviously it would seem to most (including me at the moment) that xp is the best choice for this due to its massive catalogue of games, and I'd rather not take having horrible fps. It's kind of an odd one for me, I really liked the look of KDE, from one video but although I'm comfortable with computers, I still don't feel like i'm confident enough to jump straight into something like that (considering that it's a distro I haven't heard reccomended before). Like I said, I'd like to see some customization, something that I can build ontop of almost, not in a hacker kind of way but you know, change the layout to anything I'd like. I sound like I'm claiming farfetched things right here so I'll stop talking.

Bottom Line is that I need a distro that works well with that thing called cadega is it (or wine?) as well as being a nice interactive desktop experience.

I appologise about the long post, but I feel really confused about this all of a sudden, I always do when given SO SO SO much freedom of choice.

Thank you for your up coming replies.

Unless some of your knowledge is hardware based you should forget everything you think you know, as Linux is completely different to Windows. If you get deep into the technical side of it, it can teach you more about how computers work than Windows ever could.

KDE isn't a distro, it's a graphical desktop that can run on any distro.

Linux is open source. It can be made to do almost anything. Changing how KDE looks is simple, and there's at least a few sites devoted to it.

Any distro should work well with Wine or Cedega, although you might need to put in a bit of work to get them working at their optimum. Don't expect all games to work perfectly using them though.

Thanks for replying, my mistake on the kde stuff, I thought so but I wasn't so sure about it. I may have said too much about my supposed knowledge, but I'm pretty comfortable with the hardware side of things, but I'd love to see how far you can go with linux in terms of knowledge with computers as I clearly have no idea.

Still, any particular one you could possibly reccomend me?

I know Ubuntu is meant to be that typical almost default beginner distro for some due to how popular it is, but I've also seen people reccomend mandriva and red hat. Mandriva seems to be on the top of my list but what would you say? I'm kind of uncertain how you could have to possibly tweak linux for games, I've known people have to do this but I have yet to see it, perhaps that day will come when I pick a damn distro.

Any of the top 10 listed at DistroWatch would be good to start with.

Check WineHQ to make sure the games you want to play work well enough with linux. And optimally you would set up your distro with two settings. One setting that loads KDE for your everyday stuff. And one that loads XFCE (a low memory desktop enviroment) so that you have more room available for games.

If your games don't work well with WINE, then dual boot with Windows

Depending on what you're doing, you might not need KDE at all. I only use XFCE and I have no problems with e-mail, web browsing, Bittorrent, creating documents, etc. While KDE and Gnome come with lots of useful programs, there's replacements available that don't require loading the KDE/Gnome libraries.