What's the best distribution to take advantage of my Athlon 64 3000+ processor? I've heard both Ubuntu and Fedora recommended, but I was wondering which would be easier for a newbie to use (or if there's a better option all together).

IMHO Fedora is better. It has a lot more packages ot of the box, is rpm based, but maybe you'll have to install some multimedia things to have all the stuff you need [but there is apt-get and yum :P]. And maybe some configurations.

Ubuntu will configure the most hardware with it's installation, but there is only a minimum of software. Sure there are those debian packages, a lot of them, that you can install via apt-get.

I'm a Fedora/RedHat user and like it a lot more than Ubuntu or other distribution. I have tried Ubuntu 5.04 but was really not impressed. Maybe that's why I'm recommending Fedora. An Ubuntu fan will recommend Ubuntu...and so on.

If you have the possibility, test both of them and use the one you like more.

On 6-th of june is the final release of Fedora Core 4. You can wait 3 more days and download it.

Greetz, Boby!

well, between ubuntu and fedora i would say ubuntu.. it's a very nice distro, but i've never used it on 64...

I would actually probably recommend SuSE because they were the first to offer 64-bit Linux, and with the corporate backing of Novell, I'm confident it will probably have less bugs...

Give SuSE a shot.. it's a little bloated..but no more so than Fedora..

Try a few different ones and see what you like better... I started Linux with Red Hat and then Fedora.. and now I can't even use it... I like the more manual distributions...

Good Luck though..