he bin usin linux suse for bout a month now and bin on here helpin and askin for help. Thanks for it all btw all bin reli useful cheers. and i been using Suse 10.0 and i have been seeing all the different distros you have been using on here. I wanted to try a few out. im dlin slack just now but i no thats not realy going to be for me 'cos i heard its quite alot on the command line and not the best for noobs but it sounds interesting.
And i was wondering what would people recomend for noobs, with a good gui, relativly easy to use, and maby something like YAST in suse?
anywayz thanks for the help so far everyone,
and wot distro for a noob?

Ryan

Hi,

From what I've been reading, SuSE 10 is meant to be excellent and having used SuSE myself in the past, I've found it a good solid distro with very comprehensive tools in the shape of YaST.

However, if you want to experiment a bit (and why not), Mandriva might be worthy of your attention. The latest version (2006) is just out, and whilst it possibly doesn't look quite so 'up to the minute' as SuSE 10, you might find that the excellent configuration tools count in its favour for you. Its previous incarnation (Mandrake) was what I used (version 9) when I started out using Linux about 3 years ago, and it has remained a favourite of mine - it's still an excellent choice for newcomers.

I think you might be a bit overwhelmed by Slackware, but there's no harm in trying it out - it's all a learning experience anyway.

I've been using Ubuntu as my main distro for about eight months now - I've just upgraded to the latest 'Breezy Badger' release. It's a fine distro, but lacks the centralised configuration tools such as SuSE's YaST, which you might miss. That said, it pretty much seems to configure everything correctly out of the box, and in use, it's a great environment. I like it.

Other stuff I've tried: Fedora Core 3 - didn't like it at all, performance seemed tardy and again, there didn't appear to be any proper, centralised configuration tools. And it didn't seem too stable, either.

Before you go further though, it's possibly worth thinking about what you want to do with your computer - some distro's are better suited to, say, consumer multimedia stuff than others, for instance.

Hey thanks thats great info. yeh jst got slackware to see what it was like 'cos it seems quite popular on here, i dont realy have any expectations of me being able to use it just now. i will look into Mandriva and give that ago as an experiment. i will ave a go woth some others my friend has gentoo and i try unbutu aswell.
Thanks ryan

o and yeh Suse is great enjoyed using it and made the jump from windoz quite easy. just want a go at some other stuff.

I used to live in Thurso, up in Caithness. I was never happier in my life. Great land, great people - I love Scotland. If you're experimenting with distros, throw Ubuntu into the mix. I've found it extremely newbie friendly - and I should know, I are one.

lo,
i found that the best way to learn (i have a lot left to learn) is to just throw yourself in at the deep end. i tried a few different distros and eventually stuck with debian. After many fcukups and consequently, reinstalls i knew what to do and what not to do.
Definatly give an ubuntu cd a spin.Its debian based but has gui's for (almost?) everything.
Synaptic is brilliant, its a package management system similar to yast.
if you do run into a problem, not to worry, someone else had the same or a similar problem before you and there is always something on google or linuxquestions that will help.

I have installed SUSE 10 on my machine. It is an impressive distro and looks polished and professional. YaST seems to be an excellent tool for managing your system and the way it's integrated with SUSE is exceptional.

As to the ease of this distro, I'd say it has good hardware detection, sets up everything nicely and unless you want to do something special you don't have to do much configuration once you install it.

I have Debian, Gentoo, Slackware and SUSE all set up to dual boot on a single machine. So far Debian and Gentoo are my distros of choice followed by Slackware and SUSE.

In order of difficulty, I'd say from most difficult to least:

1. Gentoo (Difficult installation. Manual configuration, but there are tools to assist auto-configuring as well)
2. Slackware (Intermediate installation. Fully manual configure)
3. Debian (Intermediate installation. Half-automated half-manual configuration)
4. SUSE (Easy installation. Fully automated configuration)

Xandros OCE 3 should not be overlooked, only 1 disk and a great mix of software.

Hey,

I would use either one of these:

Mandriva

http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=29

PCLinuxOS

http://www.pclinuxonline.com/pclos/html/download.html

Jake