alert!

I'm looking for a good, solid distro, and here are my experiences so far:

Lycoris: No compilers, not customizable enough, easy to install
Debian: Power out the wazoo, somewhat simple install, hard to get EVERYTHING to work properly.

I want a distro that has ease of use, but has power. I've heard Gentoo is that distro, but it still is pretty complicated. I'm going to try it, but how about Slackware? Would it fit my requirements of being powerful and somewhat simple?

I've heard some things about Mandrake, but it seems to take a bit too much control out of your hands. SuSE seems nice, but is it too newbie friendly? Red Hat is pretty much the de facto distro, but does it allow you to learn Linux, rather then just use it?

I currently have Debian installed, and its nice, but it doesn't work 100% for me. If I could only get it to work properly.

Oh, and are there any GUI tools for setting up permissions? I really don't understand all of the command line stuff yet.

http://www.linux-mandrake.com/

it doesn't take control away, it only provides some more user friendly ways of doing it. you can still use the more conventional methods fine.

From my experience so far Debian is a little harder to configure everything ok - depending on the hardware.
But if you want to upgrade your distro all you do is change your sources and there you go.
Plus if you are downloading you don't need to grab complete isoimages - you only download what you need.

Lycoris: all the stuff you need is on the dev cd. Simply install all development packages with rpm -ivh *.rpm. Done. To compile on Lycoris is no problem. New beta version in two weeks and production version one month after beta.

Mandrake has too many annoying bugs. Cost depends $40-60.

Debian is not newbie friendly...super stable...old packages. Free.

SuSE is stable, friendly, and powerful (what do you mean by too
user friendly?) YaST2 rocks and you can use apt4rpm to update your system. Professional edition is $80.

Red Hat is by far the most used Linux distro. Stable, not the most friendly, but powerful. The Pro edition is $200.

SUSE 8

The linux 4 all profiles ...

Mandrake - http://www.mandrakelinux.com

Not very buggy
LOTS of features
EASY installer

oh and you can download Mandrake for free

I have decided. Mandrake it is. Its cheaper, since I'm only on a dialup, then the other distros.

Debian is not that hard! And why would anyone use the stable version of Debian? The packages are far older then Woody testing/unstable packages.

What do you mean cheaper? I assume your not purchasing the boxed set then? Download only...you really should join the User Club to support their efforts.

Best of luck.

BTW: I just received my Xandros Beta 2 in the mail...loading begins tonight.

Newest Mandrake is on 3 cds. But you can install only using the first one.

Gentoo is a very good distro to have if you want to keep up to date all the time and you dont want to mess around with RPM packages which can be a pain with the depency errors.

Gentoo uses a cool portage system and utilizes the latest performance enhancements and generally is a very slick and powerful distro, but beware the installation isn't point and click like Mandrake, RedHat etc.

Nope, Gentoo's install is nothing like Red Hat/Mandrake/SuSE/Caldera/Lycoris and Debian. Jeez...Gentoo's install is unlike any others. Powerful, very powerful, though. This is raw, pure Linux power, dangerous yet versatile at the same time. I've learned a lot from messing with Gentoo's installer.

For ease of install I am currently happy with WinLinux . It is a 186 MB free download and installs from Wlndows, to a fat32 partition. It requires only 500MB to install. All the files are viewable by both OS's and it has been extremely stable for me.
It did lack kudzu but uses *.rpms for the package installation. so this was easily overcome with a quick DL of the needed package. I use it on my laptop and havent bothered to reboot for 3 weeks and havent seen win95 in longer than that.
Their web support seems lacking by other posters here but it is a decent (imho) distro for a beginner to get aquainted with Linux and the file structure.
KDE offers a simular GUI to Wlndows and I find it to be much faster than Win98, ME and 2000.
Most of the tools in Linux Config work as expected ans was a breeze to connect to a network woith the cards I am using on the machines at work and at home.
Dont forget to disable "Guest" access .