Warning: Huge wall of text. Proceed at own risk. skip to bottom for the TLDR

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Some history. I first encountered Linux in 1998/99 in my freshman year of college. My college issued laptops to every student and after finding a LUG at my school, it wasn't long until I had bought a RedHat CD and got started.

The road was not easy. Hardware compatibilty was a nightmare, especially with my crappy laptop with its integrated everything and horrific 233 Mhz Cyrix MediaGX processor. Did I get it working? yes. I even had a fully (ok, mostly) functional X windows desktop. But browsing network shares? not really. Using a printer? LOL, nope. Getting my email from the schools exchange server? no

The problem was, it was nearly impossible to do the things I needed to do for school. So although I kept dabbling, when it came to getting work done, it was back to windows.

And so it continued for years. I kept getting frustrated with an OS that was unstable and "rotted" over time (windows), kept trying linux again, and after a while, giving up in frustration and going back to windows. After it just worked. Even if I did have to nuke and repave occasionally. Linux got better every time I tried it, but there was always a lack of some feature (3d acceleration, support of some piece of hardware, etc) that sent me back.

In 2007, I even bought a SuSe Linux administration certification kit that came with a DVD and a bunch of books. Sadly I got through half of it before I lost interest. Since then, I've mostly been dabbling with Ubuntu and its variants (I have it installed on two laptops).

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TL;DR:

I'm finally ready to quit windows for good. The question is, where should I go to relearn linux? I've been using it on and off for 17 years, but I never stuck with it for long enough to get really proficient and to be honest I've forgotten a lot of over time. I'm definitely not capable of compiling and installing new kernels on my own any more.

Plus I'm having a hard time deciding which distro to use. But I'm probably just going to stick with *buntu for now, because I am most familiar with those and they seem popular, so should have the most support.

You don't need to go anywhere. My advice is that you just USE it. For everything. You can point and click, good, then you can use Ubuntu.

If you run into any problems, well, then there is this place on the Internet called linuxquestions.org ;-)

Best regards,
HMW

Ubuntu based distros are easy enough to install and well supported. It is a matter of personal taste as to whether you like Ubuntu and Unity or Kubuntu and KDE.

Many people like the Mint Cinnamon and Mate desktops.

Nice thing today about Linux is it boots to a live CD/DVD to preview it before installation.


My own preference is Manjaro with KDE but i usually recommend Manjaro with XFCE to beginners.

Unity is right out. I hate it. It feels like they copied an off brand chinese tablet proprietary interface. It was what derailed one of my periods where I was using linux. I did a distro upgrade, rebooted into Unity, and was dumbfounded. It took a computer that I liked and turned it into a spying-on you unusable piece of crap. The next day I nuked that partition and went back to windows. Most recently I've been using LXDE (lubuntu), because I've been running it on old hardware, but, while it gets the job done, probably isn't going to be a long term solution. I'm actually going to install Xubuntu tonight.

You don't have to ditch windows. You can try a free virtual machine usually and test any number of linux distro's safely inside windows.

You can go online to SuseStudio and create or load some version and play with it on a browser from almost any computer.

You can usually create a usb drive entirely in linux and play with it from machine to machine.

Personally I would also recommend that you stick with one of the ubuntu variants. LXDE (lubuntu) is a bit lightweight for me, and XFCE (xubuntu) is decent. I'm not too happy about gnome or kde, but mate or rather cinnamon are my favourites. I'm not sure, if ubuntu has a cinnamon variant, but Linux Mint definitely does and it uses ubuntu repositories as well. So my vote goes for Mint Cinnamon (or Mint Mate, if you're using older hardware).

Try them out on a live DVD first.
http://www.linuxmint.com/release.php?id=25

Most distros offer a "Live" version. You can burn them to disk or install them on a USB stick with something like unetbootin or install them in a virtualizer such as VirtualBox, then boot to them and try them out.

I'd suggest you narrow your field of candidates to four or five, then try them out. Pick the one to your liking and commit to using it for at least three months, until you get comfortable with how Linux works, before you decide to try something else.

I suggest Mint, Mageia, and OpenSUSE as good candidates; Ubuntu lost me with Unity. Be sure to check the minimum specs carefully, but, if you have 2GB RAM, most distros should run okay. If you have 4GB, you should be able to run any distro with any desktop environment without issue.

There are many threads here in which persons asked for recommendations for starter distros. You might search them; you are likely to find as many opinions as posts, as persons recommendations are influenced by their preferences; that goes for mine, too.

Me, I started with Slackware and I'm glad I did.

i have never had any real issues with OpenSUSE

Just the normal everyday "issues" everyone has with EVERY computer operating system

5+ years ago suse might have needed good hardware , BUT TODAY !!! if windows7 ran on it then opensuse will run lightning fast

Now SUSE is a bit 'off in there own world' in the RPM distros
you really can not use the redhat and fedora guides with suse

but suse is very well documented

Just cut to the chase, install Debian, read the documentation. Couple of years down the road, if you're still booting into Windows for any reason other than to update the system, then maybe you were never really gonna quit Windows anyway.

My suggestion is for AntiX MX, it uses XFCE desktop, has just about all you would need, has a well written user manual to go with it, is fairly light on resources, runs well on older machines, & is Debian based.
http://antix.mepis.com/index.php?title=Main_Page