My initial vista lisence is about to expire, and I frankly have little desire to continue using the OS. Upon countless referrals, I have opted to try out a Linux based OS- but am unsure as to what distrubution would be best. I simply need a mainstream style dist for webbrowsing and software use (gaming, word processing, etc).

My machine is relatively new, within the last year. 2 gig ram, dual AMD processor, certainly capable of supporting most recent software. What would you recommend?

Any of the main distros will do - Ubuntu, Open Suse, Mandriva or PCLinuxOS will do...

Not to be a pest, but I seriously am completely ignorant on the subject. Can someone even narrow these down- or if you are generous give me a breif breakdown of each one. I don't want to seem foolish, but I'd really like to make an informed decision

EDIT- I think I am currently straddling either slack or madrake

Allright,

Ubuntu is supported by Canonical (Mark Shuttleworth's company) and is the distribution that has established itself on the desktop. The community is very strong. The graphical enviroment is Gnome.

Open Suse is the testing-branch for the commercial distrobution of Suse. The support is community based. Graphical enviroment: Gnome/KDE.

Mandriva is the oldest distrobution (formerly Mandrake Linux) and has KDE as it's graphical enviroment.

http://www.distrowatch.com is a great site for finding more information regarding the different distros.

These days there isn't a great differences between the distrobutions, mostly regarding which software is supplied with the distrobution and does the distro provide one application for each category or many (allowing the user to select the favourable one).


Ubuntu is a good choice for a novice. Actually the only way to find the distrobution which suites you best is to try them out if you have the time and energy.

Check out the following distro chooser:

http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

I suggest you try out a live CD. They are somewhat slower than a hard drive install, but you run the distro from a CD, so it makes no changes to your system.

You indicate that you'd like to do gaming and word processing. Any mainstream Linux distro will provide openoffice, so that's not an issue. For serious gaming, you might be stuck with Windows, though there are many workarounds. IMO the differences between newbie distros are minor - they mostly do the same things, offer the same software, and provide the same experience - so don't sweat the decision much.

There are really two reasons IMO to be concerned about choice of distro: (a) Hardware recognition, as it is impossible for any OS to work with all hardware. If something doesn't work with your chosen distro, you can try another, but of course you won't know what works until you try it. (b) The choice of interface. This will be a choice between KDE and GNOME. GNOME is less complicated, KDE presents many options that newbies may or may not use.

So, my recommendation is this: don't spend a lot of time making a decision because the differences are minor. Try the following live CD's, in this order:

1. Mint (http://www.linuxmint.com/)
2. Mandriva (http://www.mandriva.com/en/download/free)
3. Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/)
4. Mepis (http://www.mepis.org/mirrors)
5. PCLinuxOS (http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?o...iles&Itemid=28)

If you try the first and don't like it, try the second, and so on. You will need more experience with Linux to know what you like and dislike.

If you do decide you like one of these distros and want to install, but don't want to mess with your current Windows installation, post back here and I can tell you about other options.

I can tell you now I wish to leave my windows installed (gaming is a must for me, and thats the only way to do it consistently and safely)

EDIT- I am considering a system wipe, so if I install linux first I understand it is possible to run windows as an application while using Linux as the active OS. If this is possible without the hard drive wipe that would be usefule to know

It's possible to run windows inside a virtual machine - Canonical offers a commercial solution called Paralells which allows you to do this very task. Other virtual machines are for example vmware.

The only drawback is the slightly degraded performance. I think you'll find excellent information on virtual machines on linuxquestions.org


Oh yeah, forgot to mention that I too used to feel that games were a must. There's a software called wine (Windows emulator) which allows you to run games in linux (some better than others but development is very active). I got the pokerstars-client and America's Army to run without a problem and I'm all set.

Degraded performance? On Windows? What happens...a rock and chisel fall out of your monitor?

But joking aside, a virtual machine sounds like a good solution- but if the emulator works than that would be IDEAL...I want to be as liberated from micrsoft as possible (the only games I play are from BLIZZARD- if that information is useful at all)

Check out the list of games at http://appdb.winehq.org/

(some work right out-of-the-box while others need some minor tweaking)

The ones that I need to work, will. So I actually can scrap windows altogether. Great work, friend.

You should probably set up a dual-boot machine. That way both Linux and Windows reside on the hard drive, but you don't take a performance hit. The easiest way to do that is to use Wubi to install Ubuntu 8.04 on your Windows partition. You can then uninstall Ubuntu if you don't like it by using Add/Remove Programs in Windows. Pretty easy, and safe.

Another option that I've never used is andLinux, which installs Ubuntu as a program inside Windows. You run both Linux and Windows at the same time.

Virtualbox or VMWare are always options, but inferior ones, due to the loss of performance and hardware capabilities. I'd strongly recommend against removing Windows - you need to take it slowly when learning Linux, or you'll get frustrated and give up.

Just my 2 cents...

The OP would be very wise to follow the advice of the above poster.

Almost everyone who says, "I hate windows" formats their computer and installs some variation of Linux, is reinstalling Windows within the week. I'm not a huge fan of Wubi, and would prefer a more traditional dual boot system, however Wubi is sound advice, as if you don't like Linux, you can simply uninstall it. The point is, is do some sort of dual boot system before knocking out windows for good. You've been spoonfed Windows since you were in 1st grade, you're not gonna completely learn a new OS in a few hours. Windows IS NOT Linux, there are very few similarities, and you can almost completely flush everything you know about Windows, down the toilet when you start Linux. You're not computer literate(my fav thing to hear from new Linux users), your Windows literate. You need to be prepared to COMPLETELY re-learn how to use your computer.

As for what to try? I always recommend Ubuntu to new users. Easy to use, just about any question you have, will likely have an answer via Google. The IRC support channels, rarely have less than 1000 people in there, a lot of them being experienced users. Ubuntuforums.org is a VERY active forum, w/ tons of help. PCLinuxOS would be my second suggestion, but I really don't care for it.. it just gets good marks for being newbie friendly.

Windows might be a pain in the arsss but when you want to install anything it almost always work right away. With linux you will have to do a lot of digging in certain cases and some things will not work.If you are in no hurry and can wait and spend days waiting to find the solution to a problem then you are a good candidate for linux. I am newbie at linux I was drawn to it by it so called "stability" which I have found is mytical but not real.I have had my share of "BSOD" (blue screen of death) using BOTH windows and linux. My advice would be install it with windows in case you do not like it just delete it.

If you're going to try/use MEPIS (my choice for beginners), consider the 7.073uce's (Unofficial Community Editions). They contain an updated Xorg 7.3 which solves many video h/w problems.

Read about it: Mepis 7.0 live CD's with updated 7.3 Xorg available here

Links to the torrents:
Download Mepis 7.0, 32 bit with 7.3 Xorg (torrent)
Download Mepis 7.0, 64 bit with 7.3 Xorg (torrent)

BTW, I seed both permanently, at least until further notice.

how are you going to dual boot vista if the license is expired? sorry if that's a dumb question, I know absolutely nothing about vista (don't really want to ), but when you say the license is going to expire I take that to mean you can't use the OS without paying some more fees. this isn't a "omg, yer pirating" question, I'm just curious about the licensing thing with vista.

as for recommendations, since you have fairly up to date hardware I would stick with the "big" distributions to start, since they are likely to have more support and more pre-packaged software available. Ubuntu is an obvious choice, Fedora is worth trying too. I'm not familiar with Suse, but a lot of people recommend that and Mandriva, too. The suggestion to try live CDs is a good one, but I would say try to compare distros that are built on different methods for initscripts, package management, etc. - i.e., debian/mepis/ubuntu/knoppix, etc. vs. fedora/suse/rpm/RH-style, so you get an idea of what you feel most comfortable with. most of that is relatively transparent to the GUI end user these days, but some things aren't, and if you ever want to dive in deeper you might find you have a preference for one over the other.