Should I use Mandrake, or Suse, or Redhat. I am a newbee, I know people say Mandrake is easier, but what distro offers most hardware support?

please please please search this forum, this is asked so so much.

SuSE & Mandrake are pretty good. I have SuSE never used linux before and it was pretty easy to learn, SuSE tech support only supports External Serial Modems, just some advice winmodems are trash.

my wife uses suse 8

it's a pretty good distro - mandrake would probably be better though

Mandrake is not better if you want hardware support. I haven't messed with 9.0 much but right from the start it has issue with Promise IDE controller cards. - boot the installer off the cd and during install it will say it can't detect your cd-rom.. That's just a tad odd? Anyway, you must disable the controller card to get past that issue.

SuSE is my distro of choice. 8.1 is the current version was released in late october or november - around the same time as Mandrake 9.0 & Redhat 9.0.

Just a hint about hardware support: If you got some hardware that is problematic you might want to go with a distro that is located where you live.They often got some specific drivers and setup routines tailored to their main market.There's a nice review of different distros at http://www.extremetech.com

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I have used mandrake and suse and both are good. Prefer suse because of the documentation that came with it...invaluable for someone getting started. I dual booted with windows and suse did all of the work partitioning the drive. VERY easy. Also, take a look at Lycoris; it it designed for ease of use and migrating users.
Good Luck

theduke: what version of Suse did you install? Also, do you have a link from which the Lycoris distro CD image may be downloaded?
Thanks!

LOL, try going there and dowloading the latest CD image. Can you find a link on that site? I sure as heck can't.

See that tab up at the top that says "Downloads"?

Here's a direct link to the mirrors: http://www.lycoris.org/download.php?...download&cid=8

You probably won't find a download at Lycoris's site -- I don't know, maybe if you have all day you could . But here's a good site for downloading all kinds of Linux distros:

http://www.linuxiso.org/

Yep, it does, but if you start at the main site, the "downloads" tab doesn't show up until you wander into the "community" tab first. Perhaps not the most obvious path, but one you would find at some point. But, that's in keeping with the way that many "new" Linux companies are going -- discourage, or at least don't encourage downloadable versions.

Thank you jglen490.
You may have noticed, as may have other users, that if you start at Lycoris's main site (http://www.lycoris.com), you could click yourself silly and never get to a download page or link, which is what happened during my exploration of the site.
RyanA's rather boorish comment points out a page from http://www.lycoris.org, which is some subnet of the original site and which I had no idea exsited.
Thanks.

deesto - I am running suse 8.1 but I think they just came out with 9.0 (?) a month or so ago. Most distros have their respective pros and cons but you can't delve into that if you can at least install. The documentation helped me alot so that I have a better idea how do some things if I move into another distro.
I will eventually get around to Lycoris to check it out from the practical standpoint of useability. While this may be anathema to many Linux folks, I would rather be productive with the software rather than spending all of my time becoming an expert. The Lycoris site has their download point in the community section I think. Also, check against their compatibility list to see if you can expect trouble. Good Luck.