Linux
 

I'm looking to switch my laptop's OS to Linux I was just wonder what is the best Linux OS for a beginer? And also, will it run properly with a mouse pad and such? (don't wan't to switch and have problems)

I have an IBM 570e Thinkpad and i installed redhats 7-8, suse 9, and mandrake 10 on it and i had my best luck with suse 9. Currently doing RH9 on my desktop and thats fun....sigh. I'm the kinda guy that dislikes the bells and whistles in an OS to a point, but SuSE is difintely a fairly easy distro to get around in.

please try to do some reearch.. this is asked **EVERY*** single day without fail. http://distrowatch.com

For a new user mandrake, suse, redhat are the best for a newbie, reccomend suse of the 3, and once you know what your doing reccomend you change to slackware.

I have tried two distros, Gentoo and Mandrake: Gentoo was a nightmare, it took me 6 days altogether, the website was unclear and I was utterly confused. I ultimately gave up. The day I gave up, I had Mandrake up and running within an hour. Go Mandrake!

ok good for you gentoo isnt a noob distro and even experienced users say its hard, try slackware once you know wot ur doing

Yeah your mouse pad should work regardless of which distro you choose.

demonbane, gotta love the positive reinforcement resulting from your signature. it goes well with your comment XD

I gotta buddy that keeps trying to push my into using slackware as opposed to SuSE or RedHat. Its a great distro, but not for a n00b like me atm. He also installed Gentoo and at first things were great, but its just too much of a pain to install it and get it updated.