Hey all,
I just recently built a new machine equipped with an nForce 4 Sli mobo, a Geforce 7800, and a AMD 64bit 3800+ X2. I've recently used Mandrake 10.1, and I loved it. It was kind of a pain installing, say video drivers, but it worked out in the end. Anyway, now that I got the 64bit processor with dual cores, I was really looking forward to isntalling a 64 bit operating system. Can anyone point me out the cleanest, user friendly linux OS out there? Thanks!

Debian, of course. Everybody thinks his own distro is the best and the easiest. Can't understand why these threads keep being posted. Look at any of the 10000 similarly titled threads, and that's what this one will look like soon.

Gentoo of course. =)

No seriously, you may just have to try a few. You will learn heaps in the process anyway. (But Gentoo is great, although it may not fit the easy category. That said I managed and I am a non-geek noob)

Mandrake has a 64 bit version also.

Everyone has their distro preferences with Linux, nature of the game really. Either way, and more especially with 64 Bit systems, be prepared for a learning curve. It will be extremely rewarding however but do not assume under any circumstances that everything will work out of the box.

I have installed both Gentoo AMD 64-Bit and Ubuntu Dapper 64-Bit and both had their uses. It was through installing Gentoo that I 'lost-the-fear' of rebuilding a kernel, however for documentation support I would have to say I found more material in Ubuntu wiki's that was relevant to my hardware.

So my advice is take a stab at the Gentoo installation, knowing that you will work to get stuff running but the insight it will give you into a Linux installation is invaluable. You may be lucky and get all your hardware configured and running correctly and if so stick with it.

If it proves too much to take in initially, take your hard earned lessons and try an Ubuntu installation, what you did with Gentoo should give you a good grounding in how to tackle tasks that would come up in other distro configurations.

The main point is once you get a distro that works with your hardware, continue with it - there is a lot to learn and as soon as you can start getting regular stuff done you are in a better position to expand your knowledge.

Personally I am now using Ubuntu Dapper 64 Bit - Gnome Desktop - Beryl 3-D on a HP Media Centre Laptop, all my hardware is working perfectly (including my wireless), it took a lot of work (about two weeks of evenings) to get it to this state and a lot of knowledge has been gained.

I am now starting to learn PHP, as I have and continue to be a primarly Windows based developer in my professional environment and need some release. The whole open source environment is an extreme breath of fresh air for me and I am throughly enjoying the experience, the frustrations and the rewards.

To sum up - do some research, experiment, find the distro that suits your hardware with minimum hassle and maximum documentation and build from there. There is little real difference in the core technologies underlying your distro and within a six months it will have altered so much from what was originally installed, you will be truly able to call it your own. After that it matters little what your starting point was, just how far you have come and what you can contribute.

I have an amd 64 desktop. I installed Fedora Core 5 64-bit last year and Fedora Core 6 64-bit this year. Both were no brainers, no work, instant results including recognizing my printer. I chose the KDE desktop-much better calculator-although navigating to grub to keep XP recovery from booting was a little easier in gnome.

Fedora can't see my new laptop(amd 64 x2) hd, but neither can Xandros,Debian, Ubunto, Kubunto, or any other linux on hand except Knoppix 5.0 which I installed last night as "Debian"-but it's not 64-bit.

Distros are all about choice, you should try a few and go for the one you like the best. I've tried out slamd64, gentoo, and opensuse 64. The most "user friendly" was opensuse, and it was also the slowest, though everything worked ootb, no real configuration required (boooring!). After that was slamd64, just like slackware, easy to install and easyish to set up so long as you know your way around your box, and gentoo is much the same. I would recommend one of the big distros if your after ease of use/install (i.e. suse, fedora, mandrake), but if you want to actually take advantage of your hardware try slamd64 or gentoo. Also, i'm sure i saw ubuntu had a 64b version, never used it myself but i've heard its a "user friendly" distro.

I've installed and used many, Mandrake 10.1 and 10.2 were by far the best when it comes to install and carry on with life. I also like the first suggestion, Debian, but it is pure 64bit, no open office, no flash video, etc. One can build a chroot in Debian for that but that falls out of the scope you specified. If you need things to do with your time, go wherever, if you have better things to do with your time, you already know the answer to your question.

Don't know if you really need to go with 64 bit. I mean, I have a Core 2 Duo 6600 with 2GB DDR2-800 and the one OS that beats all the rest when it comes to speed and performance is Debian 32 bit! Even the 64 bit version of that very same OS runs somewhat slower. Unless you have over 4GB of RAM, I don't think you would gain much from a 64 bit (on the contrary), not at this time, at least. Pick a fast file system instead if you want speed (XFS).

Even so, I've got another 5 64 bit systems sitting on my box that I've been too lazy - I mean busy - to dump and replace with 32 bit. The one that truly stands out and that I'm glad to keep at 64 bit is Suse 10.2: it's a bit of a slow booter but quite fast after that, it looks infinitely better than all the rest, has far nicer fonts, it's got a huge load of apps, you can install 32 bit firefox, opera, mplayer, mplayerplugin etc etc by default (without having to build any chroots or insert ia32libs afterwards yourself), ...

I have to say that the only two systems I'm using anymore are Debian and Suse.

perhaps im wrong, im not exactly an expert, but while 64bit pc's do suport over 4gb ram, it is not true that you require over 4gb of ram to benefit from a 64bit cpu. If your programs are all compiled as 64 bit on a 64bit os then there should be a performance benefit? right or wrong?

interpreted languages may suffer some overhead though, im sure the wikipedia told me one day that java on 64bit is slooow because of this, so if you are a java user you may wish to stay 32bit. Certainly on my pc the differance between 32 and 64bit linux is noticable. 64 bit boots faster and (most) programs seem to start faster so i rarely use the 32bit anymore.

slamd64/slackware and suse here. suse is very nice on the eyes and the brain!

Really? My athlon 64 is 50-60% faster running a 64-bit distro compared to a 32-bit distro.

Regarding "user friendly", all distros are user friendly and all distros are user unfriendly. It all depends on the user. As others have stated, try some and see. Find a distro you like. Then tweak it!

My total bias is towards Zod-64, yeah strange isn't it? None of the other distros, i mean none, not your ubuntus, slacks, debians, suses' etc could digest my motherboard except Fedora. So I'm gonna stick with this baby for a long time

I've used Fedora, Mandrake, Slackware, Knoppix, Debian, and SuSE and I have to say Debian Etch, with a gnome desktop is the slickest thing I have ever seen. It's a monument to Linux, and if you read instructions everything will work in Debian like it does in a generic instruction manual because Debian puts everything where it's supposed to go. Fedora is another great distro. SuSE is falling off as it becomes to windozy.