Ok, I have had Slackware and Ubuntu before, and I was able to get a stable, working OS, but there was one small catch: On a Radeon EAH3850, WoW on the lowest graphics settings had 20 FPS. I am a gamer by nature, and I would love to use Lin/unix, but I simply cannot do it without games.
Are Radeon's drivers just garbage, or is there some way I can obtain a good experience?

Compounded on this, I want to ask what you guys recommend. I am very computer-capable, in fact I'm learning for my A+ certification right now, but I have little prior knowledge of either Unix or Linux. Every time I encountered a problem on Slackware or Kubuntu (my most recent one, the one that had WoW problems), I either searched the documents, or posted a question here.

I really would like to avoid using *buntu again, as I want to 'taste' the whole platter of Lin/Unix. What can you guys recommend, and how are these rated?

Arch
Gentoo
Mandriva
and
Fedora

Those are the ones I most commonly hear about beside Slackware or *buntu.

Thanks

I hope your hungry! There are over 300 linux distro's, if your looking to learn and have some time Gentoo would be a good start, Slackware is good, really at its heart linux is linux. So just find one you like the Package manager of and use it. If you like Synaptic Package Manager you could try its Father OS Debian or MoonOS 3.0 is not bad either.

Try any of the top 5 or 10 at www.distrowatch.com (see list on RHS).
Note that Gentoo and LFS are compile-from-scratch distros; possibly over the top for a relative beginner.

Exactly. If you're looking for compatibility with Windows games, your best options are either buy commercially supported emulation like Cedega, or dual-boot with Windows. But personally, I've found a lot of games I like for Ubuntu that aren't available for Windows.

Cheers

I like Arch, there is good documentation on the Arch wiki and forums. I also learned quite a bit about more about linux through installing and using Arch. Have fun with whatever distro you try!

i am using fedora core from 3 years it is working fine.

Maybe take the quiz in my sig.

Hmmm...TexMex, it looks good. I took the quiz and the first option I got as answer was Ubuntu. And this is what I use.

You should be able to run WoW at full FPS in linux with little trife.

OP; From what I understand ATI just isn't very linux friendly yet. Nvidia is very linux friendly, I can vouch for that.

I would go with fedora as it has a lot of support and packages.

I have found the the ATI drivers are garbage. I have Jaunty 9.04 installed on an older IBM laptop. I know from used to running Windows on it that it has an ATI graphics chip. The fglx driver that gets installed just does not work. I had to completely remove the driver in order to get everything working again.

I've always had more success with Nvidia than ATI. Unfortunately I only found out after buying an ATI card ... sigh ...