Recomended Distro for a desktop user:
 

Hi Friends,

I am a newbie to Linux highly frustrated from Windows. I need your help desperatly, I am sorry if I m irritating you guy's. I

am planning to migrate to Linux completely. I got some questions to be answered by you who are using it for some time.

1) I wanted to know which is the recomended Linux Distro by you guy's for a desktop user. Is it Redhat 9, Mandrak9.1, SUSE

8.2 or any other Distro. Please recomend me. For the time being I have installed Redhat Linux 9. I also have a copy of

Mandrake 9.1 and Knopix 3.2.

2) What is a flavour? Is it the distribution name i.e. Redhat, Mandrak, etc. ??? If it is then what "Shrike" or "Enigma"

represents in Redhat Linux.

Thankx in Advance.
Regds,
Neosap

"Believes in Knowledge sharing and Opensource Code"

I would recomend you use mandrake 9.1. It's probably the easiest to configure and a great way to start learning linux.

1. It depends what you are looking for exactly, but you could try searching this website (that question has been asked before), or you could go to http://distrowatch.com/
In general, I would agree with CrAZy_MoNKeY on Mandrake - easiest install ever IMO.

2. a flavour (or flavor if you are on my side of the Atlantic) is simply a type. Eg:
Linux, Mac OSX, and the BSDs are all flavors of Unix;
Red Hat, Mandrake, Gentoo, Slackware, Knoppix, etc are all flavors of Linux;
9.0 (shrike), 8.0 (Psyche), 7.3 (valhalla) are all flavors of Red Hat Linux;
Etc.
Vanilla and strawberry are both ice cream, they just taste different.

I would agree to start with Mandrake because it is very user friendly. Move on to Knoppix when you want to delve into networking etc. Knoppix comes with many nice packages.

Thankx a lot CrAZy_MoNKeY, case1984, Pimple.
I am thinking of removing Redhat 9 and installing Mandrak 9.1 now as you guy's hav recommended, but I am having only one ISO image of the installation, but the Official site of Mandrake state that it comes with 3 ISO images.

Will the installation be a problem.

Regrds,

the installation was smooth for me. Nice gui look, and steps you through everything. It even has a partition manager built in (very good) I've never installed Redhat or other disros but have only heard good things about mandrakes install process

you can install with just the first CD. You will be missing a lot of the applications on the other 2 CDs but I think you will still have enough to get you going and you can add things later using Mandrake's tools. The first thing you would do after installing is to go to
http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/[/url]
with a browser (you should have konqueror) and setup urpmi. urpmi is mandrake's tool to make downloading programs from the net very easy. Choose main, contrib and updates and maybe also plf as your sources and follow the instructions. After this, when you go to mandrake control center ->software management ->install, you will be given a list of things available.

Or you can download the rest of the cds first.

if MS Windows frustrats you, you better get a screen protector.

Linux will piss you off so much youll want to through your keyboard threw your monitor

Just wanted to let you know mandrake 9.2 is just about ready to come out for the general public, might want to give that a try. I know I will.

You should try Slackware. It is a good version of Linux to start out with.
Slackware is very fast, I run Slackware 9.0 and it boots in about
1 min. You can download Slackware at www.slackware.org