I am thinking of installing my first Linux distro on my computer to dual boot with Windows XP(there are a lot of games I have that only run on Windows).

I have never used Linux before and I am looking for a newby friendly distro that I can use for the development of my games. My two options were Mandrake 10 and SuSE 9.1. So far im thinking of going with Mandrake 10. Im probably going to try out Mandrake 10 and if things don't work out im going for SuSE. Any comments from somebody that has tried out both Distros.

From what I can tell (which is not much) both SuSE and Mandrake are very userfriendly. Personally, although I feel more inclined to Mandrake (I used 8.0 for a couple of months some years back) I'd like to get a good look at both distro's. Whatever you do, make sure you get as many cd's as possible (unless you can set up a good internet connection to download loads of files after installation). I'm not having any fun with my SuSE 9.0 right now because I only have the first CD and neither kernel headers nor gcc is on this cd so I can inly install a very limited number of apps.

If you can have a third option, I'd seriously consider trying Fedora Core 1. It was my first distro, I'd never even seen Linux prior to it, and it was much easier than I could have imagined...with a little help from this forum of course.

All the CD's are free if you download them (http://fedora.redhat.com), otherwise you can get the disks via mail for the shipping alone. The first CD contains a simple program for making an install floppy, or if you're able you can boot right from the CD. It's not technically "supported" by redhat (it's a redhat based OS), but you will fidn all the support you need right here.

Just my two cents...

One question im downloading the CDs for Mandrake tomorrow but do they have any documentation on the installation and other user guides. I mean im looking through their website and they don't have any docs for Mandrake 10. Anyone know of were I can get and installation guide or will I have to use raw instinct(BTW I have already planned the whole partitioning deal)

jeffreybluml: I got FC2 with a mag yesterday, since this is the newest version why would you recommend FC1?(right, strange question seing as I'm sticking with Win98, absoluteely loathed WinMe and won't even consider WinXP)

QzarBaron: Check out the mandrake starter guide. Although it is written for 9.1 (not even 9.2) I suppose there aren't too many changes.
BTW, normally this type of documentation is also on the CDs